valuation

Last time Jill Schlesinger was here, she advised all our listeners to be patient and wait to see how the Facebook IPO would react to the hype machine leading up to last Friday's open trading. Two weeks later, we hope you listened, or you may have lost some money.

Maybe not as much as Zuckerberg eating $2 billion, but either way you should tune into today's episode as Aunt Jill explains the two debacles that sent Facebook into a downward financial spiral.

Everyone needs an Aunt Jill, right? She'll answer a few of our listeners' questions this … Read more

Facebook's stock hit a new low as reality sinks in for the social-networking titan.

Shares opened down 6.6 percent to $31.78 today. It then slipped further to $31.59.

After going public in one of the largest initial public offerings ever, Facebook's stock has seen nothing but trouble. After facing glitches in its first day of trading that halted any potential momentum it had going, shares fell 11 percent on its second day of trading yesterday.

The sentiment this morning wasn't good; shares had already indicated lower before the market opened.

Despite Facebook's massive … Read more

A day after Facebook opened its books to support its $5 billion IPO, there is still some debate over whether the social network lives up to its astronomical valuation.

In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, Facebook revealed that it had 845 million monthly users and was rapidly closing in on 1 billion. As many have noted, the key will be leveraging that massive user base to generate more revenue through its display ads and its app platform.

However, some have suggested the historic offering is overblown, characterizing Facebook as a "badly overpriced photo-sharing and gaming … Read more

Facebook has tremendous potential to become a cash-generating machine, but can it capitalize on its opportunities?

That's the question a lot on Wall Street are asking themselves a day after Facebook filed its S-1 IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The social network boasts an impressively large--and engaged--user base. Yet the company hasn't fully figured out how to make money off of them.

Investors will be clamoring to get ahold of Facebook stock, with many hoping to get in before the company figures things out and the stock takes off.

"I think Wall Street's … Read more

Will Facebook be more profitable than Amazon this year? TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington thinks so.

Arrington, writing on his new blog, Uncrunched, cited a source who said that Facebook generated $1.6 billion in revenue during the first half of 2011 and an operating income of $800 million. Assuming that same profit margin carries through the year, Arrington says, Facebook could tally an operating income of $2 billion this year.

It gets better, Arrington says. During the first half of the year, Arrington points out that Amazon posted an operating income figure of $523 million, which Facebook easily overshadowed. And … Read more

Daily deals provider Groupon might not go public on the inflated valuation that has been floated around over the last few months.

According to The Wall Street Journal, citing IPO analysts, Groupon might be valued at between $5 billion and $10 billion when the company finally offers its shares on the open market. Two major mutual funds that have invested in Groupon, Growth Fund of America and T. Rowe Price, have most recently valued the service provider at $9.5 billion and $8.7 billion, respectively, according to the Journal.

Those valuations stand in stark contrast to what many believed … Read more

Angry Birds has been a breakout success for Finnish developer Rovio, and a new report says the company is considering capitalizing on that by taking a strategic investment that would put its value at around $1.2 billion.

Citing two people with knowledge of private discussions, Bloomberg reported today that Rovio is in investment talks with "a company in the entertainment business," who's looking to get a piece of the action.

In early March, Rovio announced that it secured $42 million in funding as part of a Series A round led by venture capital firms Accel Partners … Read more

Gaming company Zynga had an internal valuation of more than $11 billion in March, according to an amended version of the S-1 registration it filed today on its path to raise $1 billion in an initial public offering.

"In March 2011, we obtained a third-party valuation report that used recent arms length transactions in our stock as the primary indication of value. These transactions indicated a valuation of $11.15 billion based on fully diluted shares outstanding," the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said.

Zynga also revealed that it had received a revolving line … Read more

In the social-media industry, a company's valuation is always a hot topic. But a recent survey shows that those valuations might need to be taken with a grain of salt.

According to a survey conducted by accounting and consulting organization BDO USA, 75 percent of capital markets executives at investment banks do not believe that social-media companies' valuations can be "justified." The survey also found that 62 percent of the executives say that the chances of a second dot-com bubble "is at least somewhat likely."

However, BDO partner Jay Duke isn't so sure that … Read more