Last week Snoo.ws reported on the speculation of Facebook filing an Initial Public Offering (IPO), to be a publicly traded commodity in the USA.
As predicted, the world’s largest social media network did indeed put in the papers to go public. The process to become tradeable will take a few months, but already the market has seen a little pump.
Forbes reported on Thursday that the Facebook IPO has bolstered a handful of other social media stocks.
They report spikes in:
- Zynga
- Renren (a Chinese social networking site)
- Sina (another Chinese site, much like Twitter)
- Pandora
- Groupon
The full article explains the numbers in detail. The important part of the story here is that Facebook’s trading intentions are helping out the social media business in general. While there’s been a lot of controversy over publicly-traded social media companies (flops vs. finds), this week’s numbers don’t lie.
Like all trade-ables, the sentiment of potential success is hashed and re-hashed, predictions flip flop back and forth. This Wall Street Daily article calls social media trades “a sucker’s bet.” But just a week before, their blog (the WSJ Blog) was hyping up the Facebook IPO in this article.
Regardless of how it plays out in the short term or long run, Facebook going public is going to be an experiment that everyone in the social media game studies. After the first wave of big Internet-based stock successes (Google, Yahoo, etc), this second-coming of tech companies could be America’s next gold rush. With success and fortune comes respectability; the more worth the social media stocks accrue, the more serious the nature of their business.
Once a place for college kids to ask each other out on dates and share party photos, Facebook has an estimated worth starting at $75 billion. It’s a huge business now, and it’s an important component of countless other businesses; we all rely on Facebook for marketing, brand representation, consumer interaction, advertising, and more, now.
In this case, what’s good for the goose is great for the gander and we’re happy to see social media companies accumulating worth. To see Facebook succeed on the market would be a win for many of us!
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