News - Facebook posts a loss of $157 million

[HEXUS]

Losses mainly due to staff share schemes started upon floatation.

Read more.

[AGTDenton]

Come on guys, lets have a whip-round and buy him a virtual pancake. Times are hard

[miniyazz]

Upon floatation, staff at Facebook were rewarded with shares and this share scheme cost the company over $450 million. Obviously without this extraordinary expense Facebook would have been in profit.

Oh irony as employee's shares are worth less because they cost the company so much to give out.. if they'd waited before giving them out, they wouldn't have lost so much.. or would they?

[Cyberburnout]

I knew this was going to happen. Too much hype and not enough true revenue to sustain the IPO price. Was a bad decision on Mark Z part. Should have waited until they had a true viable plan for gain mobile ad revenue before going public. All the can say now to that is questions is I dont know. We are working on it!

[Whiternoise]

What excellent news

[mtyson]

Currently down 14.4% as trading has started over the other side of the pond...
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb

[howdee]

Frankly, I find people overly dependent on "social networks" to make "friends" or "business" only marginally less annoying than those joining pyramid schemes and that's the whole problem with FB shares' depreciation. It's basing its business on communities of people no one really cares much about. Even if topics at hand are of certain significance, people sharing opinions on them either haven't got a clue or couldn't muster one that makes a difference. I'm no expert but to me FB shares are utterly worthless. If I was stupid enough to buy any I'd be eager to trade them for real cash by now no matter the losses LOL

[keithwalton]

They certainly do need to make mobile a priority, if only to make the apps actually usable on a slowish connection, 3G and below (not Hspa+) the main app is atrocious and the messenger one isn't all that much better.
My screen timeout is set to 1 minute and I usually have to keep it awake just for it to load anything.

It's not as if its the volume of data is actually required as I now use the timescape feature on my phone and that goes and fetches all my updates from facebook and twitter in 5-10 seconds on the same connection.

A few weeks back I did a back to back comparison, facebook app had used 12.90mb, messenger 6.99mb just for updates and a handful of conversations (no image views)
By comparison timescape has used 518kb + 3.1mb of image views.
I used Gtalk far more in that time for conversations used a whopping 147kb

[Zerox]

Facebook was just another 'pump and dump', and I am surprised that it makes any turnover whatsoever from the ads.

I feel sorry for those who fell for the scam.

[b0redom]

I knew this was going to happen. Too much hype and not enough true revenue to sustain the IPO price. Was a bad decision on Mark Z part.

Completely disagree on this. IPOs are all about raising capital for growth/investment. Facebook sold high and then the share price dropped. Fantastic news for the company. Rubbish news for the investors who piled in cash and subsequently lost money. It's selling something for waaaay more than it's worth.

[HalloweenJack]

Mark Z is set for life - he believed what goldman sachs told him , made his billions and is happy , GS , will get the flak for pushing too high a price.

[Cyberburnout]

Mark Z is set for life - he believed what goldman sachs told him , made his billions and is happy , GS , will get the flak for pushing too high a price.

Thats actually not true. They told him he was wanted to much for the IPO. lol Did they stop it from being sold knowing it was overvalued? Nope!!! Dirty dirty Wall ST.

[Cyberburnout]

Completely disagree on this. IPOs are all about raising capital for growth/investment. Facebook sold high and then the share price dropped. Fantastic news for the company. Rubbish news for the investors who piled in cash and subsequently lost money. It's selling something for waaaay more than it's worth.

For the company sake it was a mistake because now they have to answer to the investors. investors care about the bottom line and growth. Growth is the part they are having issues with. How do you continue to grow when already saturated your market? You really cant so the next step is to monetize your current base. They have failed up to this point to monetize on the fastest growing segment. Mobile. This is why they are in trouble. They still posted a profit for web based ad revenue but when you lump it all together they lost 100 million.
Mark Z part is just fine. Even after losing 15-20% of his overnight wealth he is still so set for life its insane. Unless when the employees are able to sale their shares, they start a major run to the bottom. Then he might be stuck holding paper. Kind of like RIM shareholders.