Facebook IPO: Buy Early And Buy As Much As You Can ~ MAKE MONEY BLOG$

MAKE MONEY BLOG$~The Facebook IPO promises to be insane. People will buy. Employees will go beyond paper wealth. Small, tiny public shareholders and investors will get rich. It is the American way. Pundits, critics, and analysts far smarter than me have claimed it’s a fad. Facebook is a fad.

I’m not a Facebook fan, not really, but I use it. I’m on it for business reasons mostly, but I’m on it. No matter what – it isn’t a fad, at least not technically — it’s been around too long. There are times that I think a bunch of juvenile delinquents are running the show at the Big F. There are times that I wish it would simply go away. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I also don’t think its stock price is going to soar, then plummet. As much as the social network can drive me batty with its privacy changes and apparent arrogance and indifference to customers, I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that I don’t believe they are going to fail. Not in the short term or medium term, anyway.

Back to the big reasons for its coming fad-ulous future: Useless ads, lack of Google-level profitability, and they don’t get mobile.The “Facebook fad” proponents appear to have come out of the woodwork and want to predict the coming demise of Facebook as soon as it goes public. I almost agreed with them. One of the big reasons they cite is that the advertising platform is not as profitable asGoogle when it went public in 2004 (and pick any year to compare). I can’t think of anything better to say than, “so what.” Facebook and Google are frequently compared and they are often touted as arch rivals, but I really don’t get it – Microsoft andApple have both grown, despite the rivalries. They’ve even helped each other, inadvertently and advertently (what a rarely used word). It’s a big market place, in a big world, and Google certainly hasn’t done an amazing job in social.

Useless ads

I use Google Gmail and I noticed a long time ago, and from time to time, that there are these gnats on the right side of the page, in the right column. Loads of them. Oh, those are ads appearing in my inbox — very similar to what Facebook ads look like. I’ve never clicked on one, but someone must be or wouldn’t Google replace them with something else that was more useful and profitable? I think we should give Facebook some time to grow a little and grow with the social savvy of its user base.

Google Profits Compared to Facebook Profits

Yawn. I’m sorry. It doesn’t doom them to fad status because they don’t mirror precisely the Google Wave (no pun intended; I’m a huge Google fan). I think I even own a few shares, maybe 10, – yes, that’s a disclosure.

Facebook Don’t Get Mobile

I know that’s poor English. Maybe I should have said “Facebook Can’t Has Cheezburger” instead. They acquired Instapaper; I mean Instagram. If anything was a fad, I’d lean toward the saying it was the no-revenue photo app, even though I think it’s cool. Every year, for the last 4-5 years has been the “year of mobile” and small business and big business had better jump on board yesterday. Come on. Mobile, like social, is still in its infancy. As Eric Jackson wrote this week, maybe the whole social graph thing – is still in 1.0 status. Watch your friends on Facebook in that live chat column area and see how many have mobile enabled. Of my small 450+ friends on Facebook, a fair number of them have mobile enabled even though Facebook doesn’t get it. They have time.

Some more back of the envelope commentary on next page, PLUS some gallery photos of women protesting before the IPO.

Microsoft and Bing are part of the Facebook team and service. Pundits frequently lambaste Microsoft and Bing, but they are still here. I know the revenue and profit situations are different; unfair comparison, my bad. But hey, having the #2 search engine as your partner isn’t a bad thing along with all that other wonderful demographic data that Facebook sits on. With all that new cash, they might buy Yahoo! and save Flickr (read my provocative post from earlier this week: Why Has Yahoo Killed Flickr?). Isn’t Yahoo! powered by Bing? Hmm.

Like Google, Facebook is a great equalizer for small companies, for maker companies. Best way is via participating at a higher level. But you can buy ads really cheap and if you play those ads right they might even drive qualified traffic to your website. If nothing else, you can use Facebook ads, Google ads, Bing ads, as a testing ground to see what people respond to. It isn’t called pay-per-click for no reason — you don’t pay if they don’t click. So someone must be clicking. Okay, I’m off this horse.

Mashable wrote one of the best posts I’ve seen on why and how Facebook is a contender. That’s not what they were focused on, but it is a worthwhile read and you can read it before the Friday IPO and make your decisions. Facebook Users: 13 Ways the IPO Could Affect Youby Adam Ostrow. Update at 10:12am PDT: Great post from VentureBeat onHey Doomsayers: Facebook Will Do Much Better Than You Think by Justin Kistner.

I’ll close with a favorite quote from Theodore Roosevelt because Facebook is daring greatly. I don’t always like them or appreciate their willy-nilly changes, but they are in the arena. That’s all there is to it. Is their cause worthy? I’m not here to judge that. I’m here to say that they are not timid and they aren’t going to open an IPO and lay down in defeat.This post is far from investment advice, but I will be buying Facebook, at least one share, and I’m no pundit, or bull, or possibly even financially astute. But I think Facebook has more than a slim chance of continuing to succeed, despite the critics and naysayers. Buy early, but a lot, or at least one share. Consider yourself advised. At the very least, make your own decisions and ignore guys like me and the naysayers.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

source: forbes.com

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