Tech stock market getting a bit fizzy, if not downright bubbly
Lee Celano / Reuters
Flagging a bubble? A flag announcing the imminent IPO of Facebook flies next to the American flag outside the offices of J.P. Morgan in New York City on May 4, 2012.By Bill BriggsThe imminent initial public offering of Facebook, which could value the social networking company at $96 billion, renews a question that has been on the minds of some analysts for a year or more: Are we in the midst of a new technology stock bubble?“Definitely not,” contends Jeff Dachis, a pioneer of the original Internet boom as co-founder of Razorfish in 1995.“Yes, many elements point to a second bubble,” counters Mike Seiman, CEO of CPX Interactive, a digital advertising company, who sees similarities to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.Some entrepreneurs see something in between -- call it tiny bubbles.“I'd describe the landscape as carbonated water," said Eric Christopher, CEO of Local Business Rockstar, a digital marketing agency in Phoenix, Ariz.Billions of venture-capital bucks still are “just sitting there,” Christopher said. He cited a lack of quality companies in the market and added that to many investors, “technology is exciting, but very temporary and risky.”Facebook's stunning $1 billion purchase of Instagram last month was seen as evidence of the bubble mentality by some, but not by Christopher.“With Instagram, people think Facebook bought a product or a 13-employee company. Wrong. Facebook bought access to a network of 35 million users. Control the network, and you create cash flow by selling access to it," Christopher said.He also said the market is getting fizzy with the hype around daily deal companies like Groupon and Living Social. Some of the fizz is gone from Groupon, which sold shares at $20 in an IPO last year and now is trading at under $10."There's going to be some fizz, but it won't overflow the bottle," Christopher said.Facebook's IPO, which could come in days, will be far larger than Groupon's, which was already big at $700 million.Investors could pony up as much as $13.6 billion for Facebook shares, according to regulatory filings, far outstripping the tech record of $1.67 billion raised by Google raised in its 2004 IPO.Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore Partners and Paul Sloan, executive editor at CNET, discusses whether the actual Facebook IPO will live up to the hype of its roadshow.During the dot-com bubble of 1995 through early 2000, tech stocks soared on the apparent belief that any business starting with “e-“ or ending in “.com” would almost assuredly turn fat profits someday. Old-school metrics such as price-to-earnings ratios suddenly seemed out of step as venture capitalists pumped money into a blur of unproven Internet startups. They fueled an environment of unbridled gambles on infamous outfits like Webvan, an online grocer that reached a peak value of $1.2 billion on paper in November 1999 but was bankrupt by 2001.Facebook’s $1 billion cash-and-stock deal for Instagram – which develops photo-sharing applications – doesn’t remind Dachis of the wild-West-type web boom of the '90s, when he co-founded Razorfish, a digital ad agency, out of a one-bedroom apartment in New York.“This is one private company sale to another private company," he said, referring to Instagram."Other publicly traded comps are not over-inflated by any reasonable measure,” said Dachis, now CEO of the Dachis Group, a social software and solutions firm in Austin, Texas.“No, we aren’t seeing a second dot-com bubble,” agreed Shama Kabini, CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, a Dallas-based social media marketing and digital PR firm.He said Facebook's big purchase, just weeks ahead of the IPO, reflects the emergence of mobile and social, and the aging of Web survivors like Yahoo and AOL.“There is definitely a changing of the guard,” said Seiman, of CPX Interactive. “The idea of a 'one-stop solution' (for information) has been replaced by many 'no-stop solutions.’”And with that, a second dot-com surge may be percolating, Seiman said.“The industry laid low for a while. But in the last five years, the sleeping giant has arisen,” Seiman said via e-mail. “And rather than exercising caution garnered from lessons learned, it has become buoyed by the rejuvenating effects of downing untold gallons of its own Kool-Aid. I'm looking at you, Facebook.”But he said analysts and entrepreneurs are finally learning that reach, or potential reach, doesn’t necessarily equal revenue.“Just because everyone ‘likes’ it doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot of money," he said.That same theory – along with Facebook’s ability to “place inflated market caps on other firms, such as Instagram” – leads marketing consultant Steven Mason to similarly project the dawn of a second dot-com heyday.“Yes, this is bubble part two – or social media bubble No. 1. This is really all about the brand of social media,” said Mason, editor of the “Official Internet Dictionary: A Comprehensive Reference for Professionals.”Mason is struck, he said, not so much by Facebook’s nearly 1 billion confirmed users but by the far smaller percentage “who barely participate at all.”"Facebook isn't buying Instagram the brand; they're buying proof that Facebook can do whatever it wants to – a message that everyone else should get out of Facebook's way," Mason said. “Whenever that kind of insouciant chest-pounding occurs, a bubble must be somewhere in the vicinity.”