Monday Note

Strange Facebook Economics

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Exactly three years ago, Charlie Rose interviewed Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape and Facebook board member. In his trademark rapid-fire talk, Marc shared his views on Facebook. (Keep the February 2009 context in mind: the social network had 175 million users and Microsoft had just made an investment setting Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion.)

About Mark Zuckerberg’s vision:

The big vision basically is — I mean the way I would articulate it is connect everybody on the planet, right? So I mean [there are] 175 million people on the thing now. Adding a huge number of users every day. 6 billion people on the planet. Probably 3 billion of them with modern electricity and maybe telephones. So maybe the total addressable market today is 3 billion people. 175 million to 3 billion is a big challenge. A big opportunity.

Indeed.
About monetization:

There’s a lot of confusion out there. Facebook is deliberately not taking the kind of normal brand advertising that a lot of Web sites will take. So you go to a company like Yahoo which is another fantastic business and they’ve got these banner ads and brand ads all over the place, Facebook has made a strategic decision not to take a lot of that business in favor of building its own sort of organic business model; and it’s still in the process of doing that and if they crack the code, which I think that thy will, then I think it will be very successful and will be very large. The fallback position is to just take normal advertising. And if Facebook just turned on the spigot for normal advertising today, it’d be doing over a billion dollars in revenue. So it’s much more a matter of long term (…)  It could sell out the homepage and it would start making just a gigantic amount of money. So there’s just tremendous potential and it’s just a question exactly how they choose to exploit it. What’s significant about that is that Mark [Zuckerberg] is very determined to build a long term company.

In another interview last year, commenting on Facebook’s generous cumulated funding ($1.3 billion as of January 2011), Andreessen said the whole amount actually was a shrewd investment as it translated into an acquisition cost of a “one or two dollars per user” ($1.53 to be precise), which sounded perfectly acceptable to him.

Now, take a look at last week’s pre-iPO filing: Marc Andreessen was right both in 2009 and in 2011.

Last year, each of the 845 million active members brought $4.39 in revenue and $1.18 in net income. Even better, based on the $3.9 billion in cash and marketable securities on FB’s balance sheet, each of these users generated a cosy cash input of $1.53 dollars.

How much is the market expected to value each user after the IPO? Based on the projected  $100 billion valuation, each Facebooker would carry a value of $118. Keep this number in mind.

How does it compare with other media and internet properties?

Take LinkedIn: The social network for professionals is fare less glamorous than Facebook, a fact reflected in its members’ valuation. Today, LinkedIn has about 145 millions users, for a $7.7 billion market cap; that’s a value of $57 per user, half a Facebooker. A bit strange considering LinkedIn demographics, in theory much more attractive than Facebook advertising wise. (See a detailed analysis here). Per user and per year, LindkedIn makes $3.5 in revenue and $0.78 in profit.

Let’s now switch to traditional medias. Some, like the New York Times, were put on “deathwatch” by Marc Andreessen three years ago.

Assessing the number of people who interact with NYT brands is quite difficult. For the company’s numerous websites, you have to deal with domestic and global reaches: 43 millions UVs for the Times globally, 60 millions for its guide site About.com, etc. Then, you must take into account print circulation for the NY Times and the Boston Globe, the numbers of readers per physical copy, audience overlaps between businesses, etc.

I’ll throw an approximate figure of 50 million people worldwide who, one way or the other, are in some form of regular contact with one of the NYT’s brands. Based on today’s $1.14 billion market cap, this yields a valuation of $23 per NYT customer, five times less than Facebook. That’s normal, many would say. Except for one fact: In 2011, each NYT customer brought $46 in revenue, almost ten times more than Facebook. As for the profit (a meager $56 million for the NYT), each customer brought a little more than a dollar.

I did the same math with various media companies operating in print, digital, broadcast and TV. Gannett Company, for instance, makes between $50 and $80 per year in revenue  per customer, and, depending on the way you count, the market values that customer at about $50.

Indeed, measured by trends (double digit growth), global reach and hype, Facebook or LinkedIn are flying high while traditional medias are struggling; when Facebook achieves a 47% profit margin, Gannett or News Corp are in the 10% range.

Still. If we pause at today’s snapshot, Facebook economics appear out of touch with reality: each customer brings then times less than legacy media, and the market values that customer up to five times more. And when News Corp gets a P/E of 17, Gannett a P/E of 8, Facebook is preparing to offer shares a multiple of 100 times its earnings and 25 times its revenue. Even by Silicon Valley ambitious standards, market expectation for Facebook seems excessive: Apple is worth 13 times its earnings and Google 20 times.

Facebook remains a stunning achievement: it combines long term vision, remarkable execution, and a ferociously focused founder. But, even with a potential of 3 billion internet-connected people in 2016 vs. 1.6 billion in 2010 (a Boston Consulting Group projection), it seems the market has put Facebook in a dangerous bubble of its own.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Facebook: The Revenge of the Nerds

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We’ll look at the other side of the coin in a moment, but first let’s give credit where it’s due and admire the obverse: I’m delighted to see Facebook going public, just deserts for Mark Zuckerberg and his group of very smart techies.

If you have the time and inclination, take a walk through Facebook’s SEC S-1 filing in preparation for its IPO, you won’t regret it. Pay particular attention to the manifesto Zuckerberg calls The Hacker Way and allow this aging geek (I’ll soon be 28) to sing its praises. Consider this verse:

We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Where others have stumbled as they shuffled, Zuckerberg and his gang have raced to create a technical giant. The infrastructure required to support 845M “monthly active” users that upload 250M photos each day might not be Google-size (yet), but it’s definitely Google-class. To show off this plumbing, Zuckerberg & Co. took a few pages from Apple’s (and Google’s) stylebook: They stuck to a simple, clean UI, unlike Myspace and their pavement pizza chic.

Facebook’s success isn’t just a sweet retort to Zuckerberg’s critics, it’s a confirmation of what makes Silicon Valley tick: techies, geeks, and nerds. While the technoïds aren’t always right — far from it — the great ones end up making and running great companies. The establishment bluestockings may roll their eyes at the hoodies and bare feet, but look at what happens when the suits take over. Look at HP, Yahoo!, or Cisco; regard Apple during its dark age

It wasn’t very long ago, I recall gleefully, that the kommentariat cluck-clucked disapprovingly over the founder’s “obvious’’ immaturity, his tactless management style, his poor public-speaking manner. But when you read Facebook’s S1, you’ll realize how good a negotiator Zuckerberg must have been early on. Since its inception, the company has raised about $1.5B, an unusually large amount for a start up, and well above the threshold that usually translates into management castration as investors demand a bigger share of the spoils, ransom for their assumption of greater risk.

Instead, Zuckerberg got investors to go for the radius of the pizza as opposed to the angle of the slice, their ownership percentage. Zuckerberg may own “only” 28% of Facebook, but he manufactured agreements that give him effective control of the company with 57% of voting rights

Some will downplay the achievement: ‘He must have gotten good advice’ . Of course…but he followed it. When you’re in charge, the quality of the advice is no excuse for bad performance; conversely, good advice shouldn’t be used to dismiss good results.

Speaking of which, in 2011, the company’s revenue was $3.7B, with a tidy $1B profit and $3.8B in cash – to which they’ll be adding at least $5B in the upcoming IPO. This is a nicely profitable company. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog put Facebook’s performance in graphic perspective:

Take a look at the number of employees: a mere 3,200. With 3.7B in revenue, that works out to $1.2M per worker. Turning to cash per worker ($3.9B / 3,200 = $1.2M), Facebook is about as rich as Uncle Apple’s $1.3M cash per “full-time equivalent” employee. It’s a remarkable achievement for any company, and unheard of for one so young.

But it’s not all roses.

As Zuckerberg’s Letter To Investors properly contends, Facebook can “change how people relate to their governments and social institutions” and “improve how people connect to businesses and the economy”. Making tons of money in the process is totally legit…as long as a key condition is met: informed consent. And “informed consent” mean just that: Information that a reasonably attentive individual — as opposed to an Apple patent attorney — can understand.

On this count, Facebook’s actions have been less than transparent. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the Hacker Way: Ship first, ask questions later. Or perhaps Facebook is betting we’re too lazy and ignorant to read the fine print, just like wireless carriers who try to dazzle us with their sleight-of-plan hoodwinks.

Furthermore, Facebook’s ubiquity and power raises the spectre of yet another Walled Garden: Is Zuckerberg’s company killing the Open Web by superimposing a proprietary lattice of connections between users, including companies that use Facebook to do business with its community? Many have noted that Google can’t really index the Facebook web. As John Batelle puts it:

Sure, Google can crawl Facebook’s “public pages,” but those represent a tiny fraction of the “pages” on Facebook, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning.

(True. But does Google want to index Facebook? Behind the Open posture stands Google’s real aim: Bulldozing anything and anyone standing between their ad engines and their targets.)

Lastly, let’s consider the Web 2.0 proverb: If the product is free, You are the product. With that in mind, I couldn’t help wince at the opening of Zuckerberg’s Letter To Investors:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

It reminded me of the Don’t Be Evil puffery in Google’s own S-1:

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

When I read those words back in 2004, I thought Google was either incredibly naive or a little too obvious in their do-good posture. Either way, we know what has happened: Google needs to be all things to all people, all the time, everywhere, on every device, in order to irradiate us with their advertising photons. Google’s motto should be Disintermediation R’Us. Instead, their mission statement reads:

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

…all in the name of selling ads.

In his letter, Zuckerberg comes up with a similarly lofty sentiment:

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.

I don’t mean to diminish Zuckerberg’s accomplishments. He’s built an epoch-making company, I’m delighted by the team of highly skilled technologists he’s assembled — a team that includes some dear friends of mine — and the tech culture they evince. He’s surrounded himself with sharp business people and extracted oodles of money from strong investors; he’s Bill Gates/Larry Ellison/Page+Brin caliber or above…and I’m thrilled to see the former naysayers now eating out of his hand.

So why not just say something like…

We help people connect in safe, convenient, and innovative ways. In doing so, we’ve built a business of historic proportions. We make money selling advertising that is finely tuned to reach our users in cost-competitive ways. Because we believe in Facebook’s unlimited potential, we will manage ourselves for the long term rather than for short-term profit. We have built an ownership and control structure to accomplish this goal.

There’s good evidence that the people who buy Amazon, Google, and Facebook shares are willing to let these companies run for the long term rather than for the next quarter. Smart people don’t need lofty mission statements to guide their investments, they watch what the execs do and decide if they’re using “the long term” as an excuse or if they’re really aiming for it.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Refining the Model

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Let’s come back to the business model question. My January 15 column featuring a Simple Model for digital newspapers triggered a number of emails and comments, many  questioning my assumptions (my thanks to readers of the Monday Note who take the time to make insightful contributions to the discussion).

Let’s see if we can sort through the questions and come up with a few helpful answers.

1 / Advertising revenue. Let me set the backdrop here. My model projects what I’ll call a mature market. First and foremost, time spent vs. ad spending for print, web and mobile, which currently looks look this…

Source: Internet Trends, Mary Meeker, KPCB Oct 2011

… will have morphed into a graph showing more balance between categories. In my projections, ad spending converges to time effectively spent on various medias. Also, we’ll see a sharp rise of the mobile segment, and a sub-segment made by tablets will carry its specific business model (apps, subscription, ads).
This will happen at the expense of the print media, a sector that, considering the time people now spent on it, is still vastly over-invested. Dailies are bound to suffer more than weeklies (or Sunday editions) because their primary function (delivering news) collides with mobile devices. Having said that, newspapers will survive (after further shrinkage) thanks to an unabated base of loyal readers ready to pay almost any price for their favorite daily. This is the rationale behind recent price hikes (see Cracking the Paywall). In Europe, I see all quality papers priced at 2€ within two to three years and I don’t believe such prices will accelerate reader depletion. Holding print prices up might be critical for survival.

On this topic, this is the email I received from Jim Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News:

• On May 1, 2009, The Dallas Morning News raised home delivery rates across the board by 40%. The price increase was even greater for the most geographically distant delivery.
• We doubled daily single copy price to $1.00 and Sunday single copy price to $3.00 in two steps each.
• Today we yield 93% of our retail rate, i.e., we are doing very little discounting. Lots of papers claiming to raise their home delivery rates and then turnaround and offer discount after discount. If the most valuable asset we have is the content we originate, as an industry, why do we keep deeply discounting it as if it were damaged goods?
• Our home delivery rate is $36.95 per month, making it the third highest priced metro in the U.S. after NYT and Boston Globe.
• In March, we made all access to what we distribute digitally paid access.
• Website, iPad and smartphone are $9.99 each per month. All digital access is $16.95 per month.
• So there is a lowly metro doing something akin to the NYT and FT.

Also, because of its unique advertising value proposition, I won’t sell short print media. In a nutshell, no one expects a Dior campaign to look as gorgeous on the screen of a computer or on the 4-inches display of a smartphone as it does on quality print. For such high-priced ads, print is likely to remain vastly superior for a long time — and should therefore be part of any well-rounded business strategy.

Coming back to digital media, in my view, a mature market also means a clean one. Today, many news websites URLs have very little to do with editorial. In places, the number of URLs whose only purpose is to gather “eyeballs” represents as much as 30% to 40% of all page views.
Look at what Le Monde does: when you look at a web page through Readability (an app that basically extracts relevant text), you see every verb appear in red and linking to… Le Monde’s grammar conjugation service:

That’s good for SEO shenanigans. Nothing is too petty to churn audience numbers (and Le Monde is no worse than its competitors)

To sum up, here is why I think prices on the internet are likely to go up in a near (2-3 years) future :

• a cleaner internet will yield a much better performance advertising-wise than it does today,
• inventories will have to be limited (read: closed down). No market whatsoever can withstand the type of unlimited supply we see today on the web. In our current oversupply situation, we often see more than half of the pages sold for a CPM below one dollar or euro,
• as discussed before, we can expect a strong adjustment on ad spending vs. time spent, it will benefit digital media,
• the ad market suffers greatly from current economic conditions (debt,  political tensions abroad, elections in several countries, uncertainties everywhere…) Those won’t last forever.

My mention of a $20 CPM sounded overly optimistic to many readers? It is by today’s standards, no doubt. But once a number of adverse factors are attended to, I think the $20 assumption will hold (and, by the way, I’m referring to revenue per page, not per module).

2 / Subscription revenue. Many are challenging my 10% transformation rate (one reader out of ten willing to pay $10 a month in my model.) Objection taken. Again, my projections go beyond today’s deflated market. It will take a while to get to 10% when a large site such as the New York Times is at 1% or 2%. And converting readers to pay something/somehow will require imagination beyond single pricing; I’m told large newspapers charging $15 or $25 a month are considering low-cost subscriptions plans as low as $5 per month to capture young readers and boost their conversion rate. From an editorial product perspective though, I’m a bit skeptical. What will such a downgraded offer look like: stricter paywall; low-cost apps?

3 / Mobile apps. Although I explored this issue in previous Monday Notes (see The Capsule’s Price and Mobile First, and a Mag), I should have been more forthcoming about mobile apps. My belief is this: overtime, thanks their greater ability to carry subscriptions and high yield ads, apps, not web sites, will be the path to decent ARPUs.

I will acknowledge another misconception in my plans and leave it to Vin Crosbie, new media professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, New York, who commented my piece in the Guardian.

Here’s the crux: Even if Federic’s model could work for a national daily, will it scale to work for the average newspaper? Maybe NYT, WSJ, or USAToday could eek out 2% profit margin using it, but what of the other 1,412 daily newspapers in the U.S., the average-sized of which is 18,000 daily circulation? Do the math. [...] Look at the paltry signup rate NYT has achieved. Scaled to a 18,000 circulation daily, NYT’s results would mean less than 180 paying online subscribers.

Vin is basically right. One of the tragedies of the digital media model is this: unlike the newspaper model, it doesn’t scale down well. There are plenty of local web sites faring well, but none comes close to supporting a 200 staff newsroom costing $25 or $27 million to operate.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Apple Post-Quartum Thoughts

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As if you haven’t heard, Apple posted its Q4 earnings last week. I’ll spare you my own encomium and refer you to these links:

• Despite its title, Business Insider’s list of Facts About Apple’s Business That Will Blow Your Mind contains little or no hype.
• TechCrunch provides context for Apple’s “massive numbers”.
• Brian Hall offers his trademark combination of eloquent and factual commentary while arguing that We’re Not Talking Enough About Apple or About iPhone.
• And this list wouldn’t be complete without Horace Dediu’s keen insight: Apple’s Fourth quarter 2011 Growth Scorecard.

For complete numbers, you can go to SEC filings 8-K and 10-Q. If you have the time and inclination, I recommend a walk through the MD&A (Management Discussion & Analysis) in the 10-Q. Never boring, it’s filled with meaningful details and decently written — I couldn’t find a single instance of whereas, forthwith, or insofar.
With this out of the way, a few thoughts and questions are prompted by the earnings release fever:

What happened to the “Android Is Winning” meme?

No question, Google’s Trojan Horse has made tremendous headway, powering more than 50% of all smartphones worldwide. It’s a technically robust product (comrades of mine from a previous OS war work on Android, so I could be biased) and the “free and open” pitch works wonders with handset manufacturers.

Rev 1.0 of the meme held no hope for Apple: Android will kill iOS just like Windows crushed the Mac. (We’ll deal with the Windows vs. Mac part in a moment.) But where’s the evidence Android is in any way ‘‘killing’’ the iPhone? It’s certainly not happening in the US: The iPhone Accounted for 80 Percent of AT&T Smartphone Sales Last Quarter; for Verizon the portion was closer to 70%. Apple sold 62 million iOS devices last quarter; reports of Apple’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated. (The actual numbers might include some statistical double dipping due to activations, but that applies equally to all brands so the picture remains the same.)

In the meantime, an ABI Research study shows that Android is losing market share. As with all such research, we’ll keep the usual caveats in mind…and wait for the next study.

Let’s not forget the usual litany: Ah, yes, this is great, but Apple’s success can’t last. Some day, they’ll ship a dud; their arrogance will blind them; the toxic waste of success will kill them.

Sure, we all die. But when?

And aren’t those supposed to defeat Apple exposed to the same hubris, creeping mediocrity and belief in their own BS?

Another question: Where are Nokia, Motorola, RIM? The short answer: They’re all hurting:

• Nokia just posted a steep loss for the quarter, its smartphone revenue declined by 38%.
• Motorola (in the Android camp and soon part of Google) posted an $80M quarterly loss, selling only 200,000 tablets and 5.3M smartphones.
• As for RIM, we know they’re in a tailspin. RIM just kicked Messrs. Lazaridis and Balsillie upstairs and got itself a new CEO (actually, a recycled co-COO). Last year, RIM’s share of the US smartphone market fell from 19.7% to 16.6%. (I don’t know how market research firms justify the digit after the decimal point…)

And there’s more: It now looks like Nokia has taken the lead in a race to the bottom. According to Forbes, Nokia’s “feature phones” (aka “dumbphones”), make more money than mid-market Androids.

Nokia‘s $40 feature phones are vastly more profitable than Sony Ericsson‘s $200 Android models. This is not how the smartphone revolution was supposed to turn out.

This would explain why Nokia acquired Smarterphone AS, a Swedish company specializing in “highly advanced functionality on very moderate hardware.” Goodbye Symbian and Meego, hello Windows Phone and Smarterphone. This is going to be interesting.

Speaking of Microsoft, the Redmond company stubbornly refuses to recognize that it’s a Post-PC world. Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s articulate chief propagandist, contends that we’ve entered the “PC-Plus” era: The PC still holds center stage, and is enhanced by these new “companion devices’”.

With 15 million iPads and large numbers of Kindle Fires and other tablets, Microsoft’s PC For Ever cant is wearing thin. In 2012, Apple will sell between 50M and 60M tablets; we can assume that total industry sales will be in the neighborhood of 100M units. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, openly admits that the iPad cannibalizes Mac sales – and quickly points out that there’s much more to cannibalize on the Windows side.

Last quarter, the Windows business declined by some 6%. Worldwide PC sales were, at best, stagnant; if we remove the nicely growing Mac business from global numbers, Windows PC units actually declined by 8.5%. One you’re over the hill, you pick up speed…

But this shouldn’t be news. Read Paul Robinson’s comment on a Fraser Speirs’ blog post:

There will still be computers and laptops but we will return to a time when they are bought by programmers, hobbyists and tinkerers. Everyone else will buy a ‘computing device’ of some sort and be all the happier for it.

This was written exactly two years ago, on January 29th, 2010. The iPad had just been announced — and criticized for [insert your favorite faults here]. Fraser’s own post, aptly titled Future Shock, deserves to be read in its entirety. I’ll quote two choice morsels:

For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

…and…

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.

(See also Fraser’s concise explanation of iOS multitasking here and here.)

Microsoft isn’t stupid. They’re just saying what they have to say for today’s business. We’ll see how their PC-Plus story evolves when their ARM-based Windows 8 tablets ship later this year.

Third and last for today: Macintosh.

Although it now plays third fiddle to its iPhone and iPad siblings, the “historic” Macintosh looks hale: +26% in units, +22% in revenue. That’s $6.6B with an operating margin in the 25% range. Compare this to HP, the world’s largest PC maker. In its last reported quarter, HP booked about $10B of PC revenue, with a 6% margin.

The Mac has lost the pole position before: In 2006, Apple saw $7.4B in Macintosh revenue versus $7.7B for the iPod. Right before the iPhone introduction, Apple’s halo product was its music player.

Now, Apple is the iOS company. While the Mac first donated its software DNA to iOS, in the latest OS X Lion we witness the iPadification of the elder.

So far, my experience of OS X Lion is mixed. Is it because the gene splicing is still in transition? Or maybe simply Apple committed its elite troops to the iOS front, leaving things half-done on the Mac…

I’ll leave that discussion for another Monday Note.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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