Facebook Friday – Finally Something to get Excited About?

Ah, Facebook will save us.  They have magical powers and will turn around the $60,000,000,000,000 Global equities markets with their $16,000,000,000 IPO, right?  I mean, who are we to question the power of Social Media – probably the single biggest drainer of productivity in the history of all mankind?  

How many Billions of hours of lost productivity have Facebook's 900M users put in over the past few years?  How much is it worth to turn millions of people into couch potatoes and can those ever-fattening eyeballs be converted into advertising Dollars?  That's the real question as Facebook currently does a pretty crappy job of converting – roughly 1/6th as good at it as Google is.  

That won't matter to the people buying Facebook in a Frenzy this morning as they release about 400M shares at $38 a share and I predicted we'd end the day at $45 but maybe $50 or even $55 on a spike up during the day.  We at PSW don't have much interest in playing these silly stocks until there are puts to buy (5/29) and then, if they are still in this nosebleed range – we will be very excited to short the hell out of this stock, which is really worth $25 tops.  

In fact, no public company values users like Facebook is and 900M means not all these users are Americans or even Europeans, where the average per-capital GDP is about $40,000.  No, we're into Asia and the 3rd World here were it's more like $5,000 per person on average.   Are we really supposed to believe that Facebook will convert just as much revenue from a man who makes 100 rupees a day as they do from the average US consumers on steroids?  

900M Facebook users spend an average of 20 minutes a day on the site.  That works out to 16,000 YEARS of…