Having been through the dotcom bubble I believe the Twitter valuation is reminiscent, but I don't feel the full on out of control mania that existed back then but I do pay less attention to financial news and there are few magazine covers to trumpet this stuff anymore which made it so obvious.
I have a number of friends in PR and marketing and the spends that they are deploying on behalf of clients on Twitter vs Facebook are much, much larger.
Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing though: on the one hand, large advertisers are seeing a better return on Twitter, whereas on the other it implies that growth may be capped as the pre-IPO numbers reflect higher enterprise engagement than they did at Facebook.
At the end of the day, the amount that various brands will succeed in engaging customers seems capped on Twitter vs FB (this is a three-sided: engagement, content format and growth potential) which would imply that the per user valuation should be lower for Twitter (not currently the case I think).
All of this from the perspective of a passive observer: no intention to initiate any positions, long or short.
I think that it's really, really hard for anyone to call a top for the market. I think that people who have the talent to pick individual stocks should be really, really conservative in letting their overall market calls show up in their portfolios. Alfred Winslow Jones and John Maynard Keynes, for example, both found out afterwards that their overall market calls lost money over their careers.
I heard someone describe Twitter as a massive multi-player interactive online game the other day. Tack on some ads, and you have a pretty compelling business as long as the game maintains interest and/or grows the userbase. The interest/userbase seems to be there for the current generation of devices, so it would be a scary short for me. Not my sort of thing to buy at multiples of revenues though, either. In the too hard pile.
Perfect photo.
ReplyDeleteIPOs these days are not seeking capital for investing for growing the companies but are providing exit for the early investors and VCs.
ReplyDeletebeen waiting for your comments on Vodafone Verizone deal.
ReplyDeleteHe who Tweets first, Tweet's last or was that he who Tweet's last, Tweet's first...?
ReplyDeleteBriliiant. if you are too lazy arsed to blog, get your audience to write the copy instead!
ReplyDeleteHaving been through the dotcom bubble I believe the Twitter valuation is reminiscent, but I don't feel the full on out of control mania that existed back then but I do pay less attention to financial news and there are few magazine covers to trumpet this stuff anymore which made it so obvious.
ReplyDeleteTwitter is really good!
ReplyDeleteFull disclosure: I do not current hold twitter shears but I do think that the company/concept has an important future. Plenty of growth potential.
I have a number of friends in PR and marketing and the spends that they are deploying on behalf of clients on Twitter vs Facebook are much, much larger.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing though: on the one hand, large advertisers are seeing a better return on Twitter, whereas on the other it implies that growth may be capped as the pre-IPO numbers reflect higher enterprise engagement than they did at Facebook.
At the end of the day, the amount that various brands will succeed in engaging customers seems capped on Twitter vs FB (this is a three-sided: engagement, content format and growth potential) which would imply that the per user valuation should be lower for Twitter (not currently the case I think).
All of this from the perspective of a passive observer: no intention to initiate any positions, long or short.
Not a stock for me.
ReplyDeleteI think that it's really, really hard for anyone to call a top for the market. I think that people who have the talent to pick individual stocks should be really, really conservative in letting their overall market calls show up in their portfolios. Alfred Winslow Jones and John Maynard Keynes, for example, both found out afterwards that their overall market calls lost money over their careers.
ReplyDeleteI heard someone describe Twitter as a massive multi-player interactive online game the other day. Tack on some ads, and you have a pretty compelling business as long as the game maintains interest and/or grows the userbase. The interest/userbase seems to be there for the current generation of devices, so it would be a scary short for me. Not my sort of thing to buy at multiples of revenues though, either. In the too hard pile.
ReplyDelete