Facebook continues to take it on the chin. The stock closed at another new low — $26.90, down nearly 3% on the day, and -29.2% from the $38 IPO price. Bernstein Research analyst Carlos Kirjner contributed to the slide by initiating coverage with an “underperform” rating and a target price of $25.00. He says that “Facebook’s revenue growth over the next 12 months will at best stabilize, and probably further decelerate, as will growth in revenue per user.” Critics of the social network company say that fans increasingly use it on mobile devices and it hasn’t demonstrated an effective strategy for advertising there. Kirjner adds that “there is very limited, reliable, empirical data on the effectiveness of social advertising.” Wall Street’s souring view of Facebook comes as the company faces an armada of skeptics to its plan to let kids under age 13 join the social network if parents approve. Facebook has said that lots of kids already use the site, and it’s thinking about strengthening protections. “If Facebook is serious about making the site a safer place for kids, it has to deliver stronger controls and education aimed at parents, ant they shouldn’t target kids with ads,” says Consumers Union regulatory counsel Ioana Rusu.


Facebook is covering up the fact that large numbers of Americans aren’t using the site as much as they used to. Lots of my friends actually deleting their profiles. I am going to do the same. Its been a cool run for them but I think they went for the easy money and they changed as a service. I dont trust them as a user and I dont want to give them all my personal pics and information bc I just dont trust that a public company like FB has my best interests in mind. Oh well– good riddance I think.
$25? Still too high. More like $15 the stock is still a short.
It’s going to be interesting to see what these guys do when things really get desperate.
There’s something evil and Big Brother-ish about a site that will record all of the happenings of a person from childhood through their adult life. Why are people naive to think that all that information freely given about themselves won’t be exploited against them? One place where all your life happenings and connections are listed?
Suckers are born every day.
No, suckers are born every minute. Hasn’t anyone read what they agreed to when signing up? What’s dumb is that people believe their info is safe (forget about having given Facebook approval to use info to their will). Now, how long ago was it that some bank’s, hospital’s, goverment, credit card info firms, etc. lost, misplaced, had info stolen – that ‘has the best security, ever”? Big Brother? This is worse! Facebook for me? NEVER. Buy stock? Never.
I don’t see how this stock is ever going to go up. There’s no ‘real’ product and advertisers are leaving… their quarterly reports should be entertaining/laughable. Seems like they went public just to cash out.
This stock shouldn’t be worth more than ten bucks as they over-inflated the price to begin with and where is their CEO to respond to all this? Enjoying his extended honeymoon somewhere?
For all the disreputable things Facebook has done, let’s look at the upside – 1 billion people are on it. That’s kind of like making a railroad across USA. And the people that did that also did a lot of despicable things. At least there wasn’t a ton of government money subsidizing Facebook. I am not a shareholder and do not have a position in any derivatives either.