One of the most appealing aspects of the British broadsheets must be the readers’ comments under the editorials; they
It’s a Zuckerberg World
are usually quite informed, full of pluck and tend to be more acidic than a bottle of vinegar – often correcting misinformation in the text and slyly digging at the journalist at the same time. The latest press deluge from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook-world is that the boy-king of social networking will have to go public by the end of the year, as its shareholders will pass the ‘critical 500 mark.’
What this means beyond making Zuckerberg even wealthier, is difficult to tell. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Facebook is hoping that the IPO would value the company at around $100bn. That’s right folks, check the number of zeroes in that figure once again. Of course the naysayers, of which there are plenty, think the valuation is ludicrously inflated and will go the way of the dotcom bubbles of the 1990s. The company has hitherto remained quiet about the number of shareholders it has but after 500 is reached it must provide public financial records.
Both Linkedin and Pandora went public this year and are now trading much lower than their debut, adding a certain validity to the notion that there will an initial number of shares made available, followed by a slump and then a sell-off. Many analysts believe we’re in the midst of a new paradigm, not a revival of the first dotcom bubble, while others still maintain that without a ‘tangible’ product, the all-important advertising revenue is locked in to the public’s desire for ‘the product,’ which like everything, wanes with time.
