Facebook status updates: 2012 IPO, $100B valuation? Plus slowing growth

Facebook status updates: 2012 IPO, $100B valuation? Plus slowing growth

By LEVI SUMAGAYSAY
An interesting juxtaposition of Facebook news: CNBC, citing the familiar People Familiar With the Matter, reports that the world’s largest social network will probably go public at the beginning of next year, with a valuation of more than $100 billion. And Inside Facebook says that as the Palo Alto company nears 700 million users, its traffic has dropped for the second month in a row.

Signs of the company jumping the shark — although of course, two months’ worth of data hardly constitutes a trend — are mostly in the United States, according to the latter report, with Facebook losing members in its home country for the first time in May: from 155.2 million users at the beginning of the month to 149.4 million at the end. (Speculation about the reasons are making the rounds on the blogosphere, from users getting bored to users tiring of privacy issues.) Facebook also lost users in Canada and some parts of Europe, while gaining users in places such as Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia, says Inside Facebook, which used Facebook’s ad data to prepare the report.

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2011/06/facebook-status-updates-2012-ipo-100b-valuation-plus-slowing-growth.html#respond