Mobile Fix: Giant IPOs
After Twitter’s entry into the stock market this week, Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!, compares the debut against the world’s other Internet giants.
So Twitter has IPO’d. With aggressive pricing everyone was watching to see whether it would do a Facebook and drop in price. Well no. It went up over 70%.
People need to think about these things in the long term – Peter Kim @peterkim: Rough market valuation of a monthly active user on Twitter $107.76 vs Facebook $98.85 vs LinkedIn $93.82
Of course, Facebook rebounded and is now trading around $50 so $1,000 invested in the Facebook IPO would be worth $1,269.
One of the things we have been pondering since last week is the ARPU figures that Facebook shared in its latest results. Worldwide it makes $1.53 from advertising for each user. In the US the figure is $4.19 – so there is significant potential for revenue to grow. And the ‘other revenue’ generates $0.19 ARPU globally.
In our client work we are seeing more and more brands focusing on emerging markets and given the dominance of Facebook in so much of world we expect that US best practice will be exported to other regions – driving up the ARPU.
This article, has also dug deeper into last week’s Facebook results conference call and makes the point that Facebook has lots of data and consequently a rich understanding of its users and it is constantly enriching this. As Forrester pointed out in their pop at Facebook, most advertisers aren’t using this data well – if at all. When they do, the ads should work harder and brands should be willing to pay more.
$1,000 invested in Amazon’s IPO would be worth $239k.
The common view is that Amazon has prospered at the expense of others – book publishers, mom and pop bookshops etc. But this piece argues that, as well as ensuring the customer benefits, what Amazon does is often good for the whole industry.
Its move into advertising is shrouded in secrecy with a key exec doing an interview in which she says very little – but a flavour of the sort of ads Amazon wants can be gleaned;
“I’m just a big believer in advertising that’s relevant and meaningful,” Utzschneider says. “I want us to run ads that we’re proud of. I want to see more advertising that is across screens but serves a purpose and that we all collectively raise our customer experience bar.”
A new book on Amazon paints a picture of Jeff Bezos as an incredibly smart businessman, but ruthless too. A number of insiders – including the wife of Jeff Bezos – have criticised the book. And of course they used one of Amazon’s key innovations to do so – the reviews. It still is a must read.
When we ordered our copy we saw that same day delivery is now available within the M25 and in a number of cities. Not cheap, but a sign of what’s to come.
$1,000 invested in Google’s IPO would be worth just over $12,000.
Google maps continues to fascinate us. One of the best projects we did at BigPicture made maps social with a mashup to enable travellers to share their tips, photos and adventures in Australia. Not bad for 2006.
Since then there has been lots of innovation and the latest desktop version bakes in social knowledge around traffic through its recent acquisition of Waze. StreetView is back to being front and centre, with a nice Twitter promotion celebrating the return of Pegman. Of course, as part of its Mobile First philosophy, much of this has been on the mobile version for a while.
We see lots of ways of using maps as a way to organise information and deliver experiences (the Music City project we are working on is all about maps) and if you are interested in what’s next, this video of the Google maps team being interviewed is worth watching;
“When we combine the location with the other data we have, we can actually build a new map for every purpose or every location – a very specific map that no one has ever seen and won’t be there again because it was just created for this one purpose.”
Google has taken Google Now into the real world with a ‘pilot’ deployment of 160 outdoor sites giving location and time relevant information. Smart marketing for a key Google service but it could also indicate future ambitions.
The outdoor contract for Transport for London is one of the biggest media deals in the world – the last one being worth around $1.6 billion – and it’s up for renewal in 2015.
Given the changes in the media landscape since the current contract was awarded in 2008, you have to wonder if it’s the traditional outdoor businesses that will bid. The current contractor CBS has been through some disputes with TFL and has recently been bought by a private equity firm. And industry gossip suggests they feel they overpaid last time.
Google could bring a lot to this party. It already provides free WiFi in Manhattan and its product suite could make the user experience of tubes and buses so much better. And Google would get access to lots more inventory. Maybe it could even use the Tube as ‘an interactive space’ to teach people about its technology: the sort of thing the San Francisco barges are apparently going to be used for.
The TFL contract is worth watching. After all, its new office holds twice as many people as Google currently employ. What are all those new people going to do?
$1,000 invested in Apple’s IPO way back in 1980 would now be worth $189,000.
Whilst we don’t know what new products it has coming, we do know that its interest is advertising is renewed. With lots of smart hires and a reporting line into rising star Eddy Cue, the first new opportunity is iTunes Radio, which has attracted big brands in the US and a UK launch is imminent.
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website.