Facebook shareholders meeting not so friendly
SAN
FRANCISCO — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced his first shareholders'
meeting in what has been a rocky ride for company investors.
Facebook's meeting comes after the company last month celebrated the one-year anniversary of its public debut, a sobering reminder of the overhyped IPO and its dampening effect on public markets.
Many retail investors have been burned while insiders have exited with tidy profits. Individual shareholders lined up to complain of their lost fortunes and to question the company's bumbled handling of the offering.
"We understand that a lot of people are disappointed in the performance of the stock, and we really are, too," Zuckerberg said in a pre-emptive statement to shareholder questions.
Among those seeking answers was a woman who said her grandson told her to wait after buying in the $42 to $43 range. Many pressed with questions on the company's strategy at the meeting in Millbrae, Calif. The meeting was streamed on the Internet.
The executive gathering follows heated privacy concerns fueled by reports of leaked documents suggesting the social network and other Silicon Valley giants provided server access to the National Security Agency.
"No agency has any direct access to our servers," Zuckerberg said. "We basically give the minimum amount of information that we need to comply with the law."
Shareholders approved the slate of items including the re-election of board members Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and three others. Venture capitalist Jim Breyer announced plans in April to step down.
Facebook faced a barrage of questions, including questions about the threat of Google+, the rising popularity of photo-sharing sites, privacy in the wake of the NSA flap and ongoing concerns over the stock price.
"This isn't a zero-sum game," Zuckerberg said of Google's rival social network.
Facebook has posted solid quarterly revenue gains above 30% since going public. And the company has successfully maneuvered to meet members' mobile demands to gain revenue there, a steady refrain from Zuckerberg to shareholders.
Yet investors have grounds for agitation: Shares of Facebook remain roughly 40% lower than the $38 IPO pricing as insiders sell stock.
"The company still has a market cap in the vicinity of $60 billion, and if it wasn't for the fact that it had gone public at a market valuation of $104 billion, it would be viewed as wildly successful," says Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida.
Shares of Facebook closed 1.2% lower at $24.03 Tuesday after the shareholder meeting.
FACEBOOK'S FACE-PLANT HAS FADED
After Facebook's IPO landed with a thud a year ago, it put a damper on consumer-related Web offerings in late 2012 and early this year.
But since its infamous face-plant, Facebook has rebounded nicely. Despite the rap against Internet companies as money-losing stocks, the social network has been profitable the past two quarters.
That's been aided in part by it serving up mobile users migrating from desktops. "Clearly, some of the ad units that Facebook offers fit well into the mobile environment. That's pretty good news," says Forrester analyst Nate Elliott.
Last month, Facebook rang up $1.5 billion in revenue for its first quarter, 38% higher than it was in the same quarter a year ago. Facebook's net income of $219 million was 6.8% better than a year ago. That's above the 5% earnings growth reported by Standard & Poor's 500 companies in the first quarter, says S&P Capital IQ.
Facebook's financial upturn, in great measure, is a reflection of its burgeoning mobile business — not to mention growth in all areas, says tech analyst Greg Sterling.
Facebook reassured investors that it was keyed into the mobile future. "As people use our mobile experiences more and more, we'll be able to grow our businesses and build the economic engine around that to continue growing our revenue and profitability going into the future," Zuckerberg told shareholders Tuesday.
Some 751 million of Facebook's 1.11 billion monthly active users access the site on mobile devices. That's up 54% from the same time a year ago.
About 30% of the company's $1.25 billion in first-quarter ad revenue came from mobile ads. A year ago, not a penny of its $872 million in quarterly ads was from mobile.
A good deal of mobile traffic has come from new wrinkles to Facebook's look, such as the recent addition of Graph Search, a tool for users to sift through piles of pictures, posts and places. The feature is a grab for data-obsessed advertisers and a bid to siphon business from competitors Google, Foursquare and Yelp.
Facebook's meeting comes after the company last month celebrated the one-year anniversary of its public debut, a sobering reminder of the overhyped IPO and its dampening effect on public markets.
Many retail investors have been burned while insiders have exited with tidy profits. Individual shareholders lined up to complain of their lost fortunes and to question the company's bumbled handling of the offering.
"We understand that a lot of people are disappointed in the performance of the stock, and we really are, too," Zuckerberg said in a pre-emptive statement to shareholder questions.
Among those seeking answers was a woman who said her grandson told her to wait after buying in the $42 to $43 range. Many pressed with questions on the company's strategy at the meeting in Millbrae, Calif. The meeting was streamed on the Internet.
The executive gathering follows heated privacy concerns fueled by reports of leaked documents suggesting the social network and other Silicon Valley giants provided server access to the National Security Agency.
"No agency has any direct access to our servers," Zuckerberg said. "We basically give the minimum amount of information that we need to comply with the law."
Shareholders approved the slate of items including the re-election of board members Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and three others. Venture capitalist Jim Breyer announced plans in April to step down.
Facebook faced a barrage of questions, including questions about the threat of Google+, the rising popularity of photo-sharing sites, privacy in the wake of the NSA flap and ongoing concerns over the stock price.
"This isn't a zero-sum game," Zuckerberg said of Google's rival social network.
Facebook has posted solid quarterly revenue gains above 30% since going public. And the company has successfully maneuvered to meet members' mobile demands to gain revenue there, a steady refrain from Zuckerberg to shareholders.
Yet investors have grounds for agitation: Shares of Facebook remain roughly 40% lower than the $38 IPO pricing as insiders sell stock.
"The company still has a market cap in the vicinity of $60 billion, and if it wasn't for the fact that it had gone public at a market valuation of $104 billion, it would be viewed as wildly successful," says Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida.
Shares of Facebook closed 1.2% lower at $24.03 Tuesday after the shareholder meeting.
FACEBOOK'S FACE-PLANT HAS FADED
After Facebook's IPO landed with a thud a year ago, it put a damper on consumer-related Web offerings in late 2012 and early this year.
But since its infamous face-plant, Facebook has rebounded nicely. Despite the rap against Internet companies as money-losing stocks, the social network has been profitable the past two quarters.
That's been aided in part by it serving up mobile users migrating from desktops. "Clearly, some of the ad units that Facebook offers fit well into the mobile environment. That's pretty good news," says Forrester analyst Nate Elliott.
Last month, Facebook rang up $1.5 billion in revenue for its first quarter, 38% higher than it was in the same quarter a year ago. Facebook's net income of $219 million was 6.8% better than a year ago. That's above the 5% earnings growth reported by Standard & Poor's 500 companies in the first quarter, says S&P Capital IQ.
Facebook's financial upturn, in great measure, is a reflection of its burgeoning mobile business — not to mention growth in all areas, says tech analyst Greg Sterling.
Facebook reassured investors that it was keyed into the mobile future. "As people use our mobile experiences more and more, we'll be able to grow our businesses and build the economic engine around that to continue growing our revenue and profitability going into the future," Zuckerberg told shareholders Tuesday.
Some 751 million of Facebook's 1.11 billion monthly active users access the site on mobile devices. That's up 54% from the same time a year ago.
About 30% of the company's $1.25 billion in first-quarter ad revenue came from mobile ads. A year ago, not a penny of its $872 million in quarterly ads was from mobile.
A good deal of mobile traffic has come from new wrinkles to Facebook's look, such as the recent addition of Graph Search, a tool for users to sift through piles of pictures, posts and places. The feature is a grab for data-obsessed advertisers and a bid to siphon business from competitors Google, Foursquare and Yelp.
Facebook Purging Conservatives: Are You Next?
Imagine you are chatting with a friend on facebook and your oven timer goes off. So you type those familiar initials “brb” to tell the person on chat that you will “be right back”. You turn the oven off, eat your dinner, and settle again in front of the computer to realize facebook logged you out while you were gone. When you try to log back in, you get a message telling you to upload your driver’s license to verify your identity. You send, and send, and send your driver’s license, but nothing happens. During this carousel ride, they ask you to validate your email address over and over. Suddenly the realization begins to set in that your life has changed in a second. Thousands of contacts, friends, photographs, saved messages, notes, and years of your life simply disappeared because someone at facebook doesn’t like what you have to say. So you file a report with Facebook security, but they ignore you. You go online and, get their phone number and call them, only to hear the impersonal voice tell you, “Sorry, we don’t offer support.”Facebook has been guilty of deleting people’s accounts without warning or provocation many times. This happened last night to Lady Patriot, Julia Sieben. She was chatting with a friend about an article they were planning to write when she walked away. She came back to find all her valuable data had been stolen. Friends reported that her page was no longer available. Facebook replaced her comments in their chat with a box that said, “This message is no longer available because it was identified as abusive or marked as spam.” Her avatar was gone along with everything she had been working on for years.
When we told facebook followers what happened, quite a few of them reported having the same experience. One minute their account was there, and then it was gone. Why does facebook do this? How do they get away with it? For quite awhile they have radically censored what people can and cannot post on their wall or page. It appears conservatives activists are the targets for this censorship. It’s a joke among conservatives who find themselves in “facebook jail” for all sorts of reasons.
We all know most sites will ban you for vulgar language, so it just makes sense that facebook wouldn’t tolerate people using the “f bomb”. As painful as it was, I typed that word into facebook’s search bar, and there were so many pages with that word in the title that I finally gave up trying to count them. Let’s just say that they haven’t banned any of them even if they had sensual photographs on them that bordered on porn. I didn’t need to check any other words because I figured if facebook allowed that one then nothing is forbidden. Well, almost nothing.
Using a person’s name when you respond to them in a post will get you banned for a week. Yes, a whole week for following the rules of polite conversation, and using the name of the person you are addressing can keep you from posting on any walls, including your own. That happened to a friend of mine. You can also get banned from posting anything for 15 days if you post the same link on too many conservative pages. One woman told me that she sent a friend a Christmas picture of the back of a man wearing nothing but angel wings and snow boots that was making the rounds on the internet. Facebook banned her friend for three days because she sent him the picture. And who hasn’t been banned for a week for sending too many friend requests to people they don’t personally know? I have five days left on my own ban. I’m not allowed to send friend requests to anyone or answer any messages from people who are not on my friend list now.
Julia Sieben didn’t get this level of courtesy. She had her entire account snatched away and was never given an explanation. She finally did get another account made, but she lost everything from her first one. They have her on restrictions forcing her to type in a code each time she sends a friend request or makes a post on her wall or that of a friend’s. I caught up with Julia this afternoon, and we had a conversation. I asked her a few questions that I thought I would share with you to maybe keep the same thing from happening to your account.
Dr. Schuetz: Julia, what was the first thing you saw when you returned to your computer?
Julia: I saw that I had been logged out. A message was there telling me to log back in. When I tried, I was told that someone may have accessed my account. They said to secure my account I’d need to answer a few questions, and change my password. There it is in picture 1.
Dr. Schuetz: Yes, I noticed you have some pictures here, can you tell me about them?
Julia: Yes, when I realized what they were doing, I took screenshots of everything they told me to do. I learned a long time ago to get as much information and facts as possible.
Dr. Schuetz: That was smart. So, what happened next?
Julia: It told me to log in through a browser I had used before. Here’s the picture. See, picture 2. They kept telling me that I needed to verify my identity, but they wouldn’t accept the copy of my driver’s license. I kept sending it, but nothing happened. It told me to log in through the browser where I was. Here’s the picture. That’s here in picture 3.
Dr. Schuetz: I see in picture 4 that they are asking for a secure email.
Julia: Yes, I kept putting my email in there, but it wouldn’t take it either.
Dr. Schuetz: This happened on Saturday, June 9th at around 5 PM you said?
Julia: Yes, around then, I’m not certain of the exact time, but It was during dinner.
Dr. Schuetz: Have you heard anything from facebook in the past 24 hours since this happened?
Julia: I finally got through to someone through email.
Dr. Schuetz: Tell us about it.
Hash Tag #FacebookSucks
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