Weekly Internet Update: Facebook & Google
This week, we saw some significant developments related to Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which could impact their value in the coming years. Here are some of them:
Facebook’s stock has tanked since it went public and is now trading much below its initial price. While it may be trading at a deflated valuation right now, we believe that its long-term prospects are pretty encouraging and it could eventually be worth much more. This week, it announced its plans to launch a new social advertising exchange for its ad platform which will enable advertisers to bid on ads real-time. By offering a real-time bidding platform for advertisers with targeting capabilities to reach specific types of users, Facebook is aiming to drive online social ad sales which form a major portion of its overall revenue. It plans to emulate Google’s success with the Adwords automated real-time bidding system.
Facebook also launched a new Facebook for WordPress plugin which enables WordPress users to easily integrate Facebook features like social publishing, mentions and comment discussions into their WordPress blogs. It enables users to cross-post content to their Facebook Timeline and adds in some other widgets like a live activity feed, recommendations, customizable like, subscribe and send buttons and a comments box. With this, it’s targeting blogs to drive engagement on its platform.
We currently have a $33 Trefis price estimate for Facebook, which stands nearly 20% above its market price.
Check out our complete analysis of Facebook
It was a pretty boring week for Google. It updated its Chrome browser for the Mac and also released a Windows 8 compatible Metro-style version of Chrome.
It also announced the launch of Google+ Local, which is integrated with listing information from Zagat. Google+ Local offers a repository of information on restaurants with features such as Zagat scores and recommendations from your friends on the Google+ network.
Google’s share of searches in the U.S. market increased last month, while both Microsoft and Yahoo lost share.
We currently have a $680 Trefis price estimate for Google, which stands nearly 20% above its market price.