What Is Facebook Really Worth?

>

My Washington Post Sunday Business column is out. This morning, we look at how overvalued the $100 billion dollar Facebook IPO is.

The print version had the full headline What’s Facebook worth? Much less than advertised — in the online edition, it was Less than meets the eye at Facebook.

Its based on my discovery from the Facebook S1 filing that merely clicking on a “Like” button anywhere on the internet counts you as an active user according to FB’s unique metrics.

Here’s an excerpt from the column:

“Last week, I made a surprising discovery about Facebook: It has far fewer “active” users than it claims. I learned this from a note buried deep in the company’s S1 — the IPO document it filed with the SEC in order to go public. Based on its S1, the social-networking giant’s value is probably much less than most investors seem to think.

One advantage of working in finance is that you get to meet lots of very nice, really smart people such as David Wilson, who writes the Chart of the Day column for Bloomberg. His column is my Sudoku, as I challenge myself to poke holes in the correlations it identifies between various assets. It’s good wonky fun.

On Feb. 3, the column used Facebook’s SEC data to show how fast the firm was growing. FB was becoming a “daily habit for more users,” and the numbers from the IPO filing were extraordinary: 845 million Monthly Active Users and 483 million Daily Active Users.

MAU? DAU? I had never heard of either metric, and novel accounting for public companies is always a red flag. Don’t just take my word for it, ask a Groupon investor.

I thought these metrics were suspect. If you do not have to go to Facebook.com to be counted as an active user, are the metrics misleading? I asked Wilson, who pointed to details in the S1:

“Daily Active Users (DAUs). We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our Web site or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party Web site that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day. We view DAUs, and DAUs as a percentage of MAUs, as measures of user engagement.”

Let me translate: If you clicked a “Like” button anywhere on the Internet, then you are a Daily Active User. Even if you never go to Facebook.com.”

>

I really like that the Post used the Limericks Économiques I referenced right at the start of the column:
>
click for ginormous version of print edition

>

>

Source:
Less than meets the eye at Facebook
Barry Ritholtz
Washington Post, February 12 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/less-than-meets-the-eye-at-facebook/2012/02/09/gIQA7RtF7Q_story.html

Washington Post Sunday, February 12 2012 page G6 (PDF)