The circus has come to down, and it is the Facebook initial public offering roadshow. Last Friday apparently saw co-underwriter JP Morgan‘s lobby festooned with banners saying “Welcome, Facebook!” while today the company’s investor meeting in New York was a jam-packed affair, a source tells me, with perhaps a thousand people trying to get into the Sheraton Hotel.
It appears that the centerpiece of today’s presentation was basically a movie shown to investors, which you can check out on the company’s Web site here.
In advance of the festivities, Bernstein Research’s Carlos Kirjner sent a missive to clients advising of eight things they might want to ask the company about should the happen to participate:
What are the barriers to speeding up revenue growth, and why haven’t advertisers moved faster to spend on the site? That’s a topic of particular interest given that the revised IPO prospectus last week showed an 8% drop in ad revenue from the prior quarter.How is the company going to balance further “monetizing” the site while maintaining the “experience” of users? The company has to “strike the right balance,” he insists.What’s founder Mark Zuckerberg think about “shareholder value” given that he’s the controlling shareholder?What will be the effects of consumer privacy and regulation?“Will Facebook offer improved discovery mechanisms to allow users to find new objects and applications across the Social Graph?”What was the valuation the company used to come up with its $1 billion purchase price for Instagram?How will rising use of mobile devices affect existing desktop use of Facebook?And as Facebook gets deeper into mobile, will have to start to pay a “traffic acquisition cost,” or TAC, to mobile operators, the way Google (GOOG) does to get its ad revenue?
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