Securing Facebook could have a synergistic effect for the winner platform however it is doubtful that it will significantly change listing revenues at either exchange. According to insiders on Wall Street, Facebook could file IPO documents with regulators as soon as March. Sources also report that Facebook has already reserved their ticker symbol as “FB”.

CFO David Ebersman and other prominent members of Facebook’s staff have already heard from both exchange platforms on the merits of choosing one versus another but no decisions have yet been made. As their campaigns push forward I’m sure we’ll hear a decision from Facebook soon.

WebProNews gave you the run-down of Google’s conference where they revealed that their Google Sites revenues were up 29% over their fourth quarter earnings in 2010 and that they passed the $10 billion mark for quarterly earnings, a first in their history. Even their growth from the third quarter to the fourth quarter in 2011 was up 9%.

Everything’s up! Everybody’s rich! If you work at Google you can’t even pour a cup of coffee in your office without the bass line from The O’Jay’s ‘For The Love Of Money’ playing automatically.

So… why’re people disappointed with Google’s record-breaking earnings?

Reuters reports that analysts “zeroed in on an 8 percent drop in cost-per-click, or money paid by marketers to the company for search ads, versus analyst estimates of a slight increase.”

Mayuresh Masurekar, an analyst at Colins Stewart, told Reuters, “The major question is: Is this a one-time thing or is this something that is going to continue because the nature of the business has changed.”

Even the tea leaf readers on Twitter echoed the sentiment.

The results were disappointing enough that the speculators on Wall Street, in their esoteric wisdom, considered Google’s earnings to have missed expectations – a declaration that sent shares of Google falling more than 9% after the earnings were announced. The Wall Street Journal elaborated on the reaction from investors and said, “Though Google’s quarterly performance still represented a sequential increase, investors voiced concerns that its growth had decelerated from previous quarters. The company’s net revenue of $8.13 billion missed consensus estimates of $8.4 billion.”

$270,000,000 is a ton of money, don’t get me wrong. It’s more money than I will see in my entire lifetime; I probably won’t even earn a quarter of that while I’m alive. It’s so much money that it might as well be Monopoly money. But still, in terms of Google Bucks, it’s only a little over 3% of that $8.13 net revenue they posted and when you’re parsing money expectations in the value of billions, should this really be enough of a “loss” to send Google shares into a decline?

Based on the effect the news of Google’s earnings had on the stock market, the answer would be a resounding yes: all of these “concerns” expressed by shamans of Wall Street were enough to send Google’s shares dropping more than $57.

Google’s shares have started to recover a little bit today, only being down $50.96 this morning, but all of this market speculation has got me wondering: what do people really expect of Google? Saying that Google “underperformed” despite their shares being some of the most valuable on the market and they posted significant increases revenues from not just last quarter but last year is puzzling and so I would really like to know exactly what analysts expect from Google? Would that $270 million of missed revenue really have made that much of a difference in the success of a company that is now making over $10 billion for quarterly earnings? Google still generating tons of revenue. What kind of bizarro market declares the earnings of billions but not enough billions to be a disappointment? It seems ludicrous.

So what do you think? Is this a tempest in a tea cup that Wall Street is stirring with Google? Are expectations so high for Google right now that anything short of generating profits laced in Martian gold is considered a disappointment? Seriously, what do people expect from Google these days when something like making more billions of dollars doesn’t quite get it done? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Like The O’Jays told you all: don’t let money ruin ya.

Let’s take a look.

We know the movement was started by a Canadian based organization, called Adbusters. A single tweet from the organization, on July 4th, was the official beginning of the movement. From there, it continued to grow and keeps expanding further.

The worldwide movement has had a large assortment of problems when trying to assemble in various cities. In the United States, Occupy Oakland and Occupy Seattle have been the biggest hotbeds of controversy. The Occupy Oakland demonstration lead to violence, due to occupiers not leaving when given notification by law enforcement. With the carnage being captured on video:

While most of the coverage of the movement has had negative connotations attached to it, either for the protestors themselves or the reaction by lawmakers and authorities; there remains a looming question. What does Occupy Wall Street truly represent?

The Daily Show asked this very question in the only way it knows how, with humor.

There have been more serious responses to the most important question, “Occupy Wall Street, What Do They Want?“. According to the post, there are very clear cut changes the movement wants to see come into fruition. All involve changes directly relating to corporations of course, but there are mentions of free speech and decreasing the USA’s militaristic attitude.

The avenues in which the protests are being represented show the power a single phone or blog can have. For instance, if you want an up close view of what’s happened at the latest Occupy NYC event, here’s a live recorded stream:

The message of Occupy Wall Street has taken to artistic forms as well. The coolest I’ve seen is from MK12, who created this video as a trailer for the 2011 Zero Film Festival. Allowing a game of Pong to explain the message being relayed by the movement.

Conan O’ Brien’s long time running guest, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog dropped in on the Occupy movement to poke some fun at both the protestors and Wall St. itself.

Jesse Comart of Mashable, asks what is possibly the most important question of all. Can Occupy Wall Street keep the momentum going, and see their principles shift into direct actions which can facilitate change? Making direct comparisons to the Tea Party, and how their movement was able to directly influence Washington politics.

The story of Occupy Wall Street will keep continuing, either towards a definitive end with us simply looking back at this small portion of time when a movement started by a simple tweet erupted into something much larger. Or, the OWS influence will grow and be able to facilitate the change they’re rallying for.

What has been your take away from the movement up to this point? What have been some of the interesting ways you’ve noticed OWS being represented both online and off?

Hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading practices that resulted in over $50 million in profits. The founder of the Galleon Group (which used to be one of the largest hedge fund management firms in the world) was also ordered to pay $10 million in fines.

Rajaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, was arrested by the FBI in 2009. Prosecutors called him “the modern face of illegal insider trading” and accused him of profiting on tips from a well-connected group of insiders that included former IBM and Intel execs. In May, he was convicted of 14 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud.

Good news for Raj – his sentence, though the longest in history for insider trading, is still shorter than the up to 24 years the the federal government requested.

According to the NYT, his sentence is an example of recent trend – white collar criminals receiving harsher penalties. Although some down at the OccupyWallStreet protests might scoff at that notion, insider trading penalties have been on the rise as of late.

A former Galleon trader, Zvi Goffer, got a 10 year sentence for his role in the insider trading. The average length of sentences for the other people convicted in Rajaratnam’s case is 3 years.

Twitter is sounding off about the sentencing, and Raj isn’t getting much sympathy –

Some have used this sentence as an example that there is some justice for financial crimes –

In 2009, Rajaratnam was the 236th richest man in America and the richest person in the world to have been born in Sri Lanka.

What do you think about this sentence? How do you think the political climate affected it, if at all? Let us know in the comments.

The online retailer said its net income increased 71 percent to $384 million in the fourth quarter, or 85 cents per share, compared with $225 million, or 52 cents per share in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Net sales increased 42 percent to $9.5 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $ 6.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008.

"Millions of people now own Kindles," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

"And Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months."

Amazon said it expects its operating profit for the first quarter of 2010 to be between $275 million to $365 million, on revenue of $6.4 billion to $7 billion, for growth between 32 percent and 43 percent.

Shares rose 3.7 percent in after hours trading to $130.41 signaling investors were pleased with Amazon’s Q4 results.
 

Related Articles:

> Amazon Kindle Publishers and Authors to Get More Royalties

> Amazon Kindle Breaks Monthly Sales Record

> Amazon In eBook Deal With Best Selling Author

The Wall Street Journal takes a close look–aka one long article that includes everything we’ve covered over the past few months–at how Google is battening down the hatches.

If you rely on any of Google’s fringe services, you should be concerned about this:

So with the U.S. economy in a recession, Google is ratcheting back spending and cutting new projects. “We have to behave as though we don’t know” what’s going to happen, says Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. The company will curtail the “dark matter,” he says, projects that “haven’t really caught on” and “aren’t really that exciting.” He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”

Google has already pulled the plug on Lively and SearchMash–easy decisions considering they had no momentum–but what about the other “non-search” offerings?

If your business relies on anything outside of Google’s core offerings–search, ads and apps–then you might want to consider a back-up plan. Google could pull the rug at any time.

What service do you think Google will shut down next?

Comments

I know I will probably ruffle a few feathers here but I don’t see this as such a big deal because I believe that most of the ‘success’ of these mediums has been more hype than reality. The article points out that the main reasons that what is really happening is the fact that advertisers are less likely to throw money at something that there is little proof of real returns, “Areas like mobile, virtual worlds and widgets are expected to be hit particularly hard, as it remains unclear what kind of impact ads in these media have.”

Since we internet marketers love to talk about what is cool and happening and what the next big thing is the industry tends toward hyperbole far too often. Hype exceeds reality in this space by a few years at a minimum. When people are forced to look at things with more discerning eyes the shine comes off of these new areas pretty quickly. Who can argue with Peter Kim, Senior Partner at Dachis which advises the likes of Johnson & Johnson on marketing strategies when he says:

“When we get into the need to drive results, you can’t spend money on the experiments and hope to keep your job and get your sales goals.”

That’s just reality talking and I believe that oftentimes the internet marketing world checks reality at the door and thinks cool outranks smart. It doesn’t matter what market you are in, when you throw away money on unproven (and sometimes just plain speculative) marketing options you are being irresponsible. Accountability in the financial markets is an important subject these days. How about accountability in marketing?

Aside from the effect of less spending there may be another consequence of this slowdown which will be consolidation in the already ‘boutiquey’ world of these experimental advertising vehicles. Investment in these kinds of companies will slow. This all comes together as a ‘perfect storm’ of difficult factors for this industry that is trying to tap into the tremendous ‘potential’ that may need to be redefined anyway. Realistic projections would be interesting to see versus the hype we see all the time.

To wrap up, Larry Bettino, a general partner at StarVest Partners, a New York based investment fund says, “The assumption that eyeballs would generate ad revenue is no longer valid. Many firms won’t be able to survive what is going to be a much more difficult environment.” What I take away from that is that is that we should be concentrating on the elements of online marketing that work. While it sounds very plain vanilla and not so exciting, search marketing is hard to argue with even the dollars are getting tighter. There is nothing wrong with getting back to basics even in the ‘new world economy’.

Comments

Yahoo Profits From Wall Street Love

How about some passion for Yahoo from the wheelers and dealers on Wall Street? Bear Stearns has found some love in its flinty heart for the much-derided Yahoo.

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blog said Internet analyst Robert Peck of Bear Stears thinks far too many people are down on shares of YHOO:

Peck provides a list of potential catalysts for the stock over the next 16 months:

•  Success from branding initiatives.
•  Good results from Panama.
•  Takeover/strategic partnership talks.
•  Alibaba IPO.
•  Material share repurchase.

Peck has a price target on the stock of $30. Today, the stock is up 97 cents at $23.70.

Peck’s pick of Yahoo as a top pick has it pecking away at a nice start to the day on Wall Street. Yahoo gained $1.12 to $23.85 near midday, amid general rises in the NASDAQ, Dow, and S&P 500 indices.

Yahoo Heaped With Negative Vibes

Even as Google kicked seven kinds of snot out of Yahoo and everyone else in the search advertising market, Yahoo always had its display ad business as a bulwark against disaster.

That may have accounted for Yahoo president Sue Decker’s breezy comment to Bloomberg in January 2006 about how Yahoo is not going to be number one in search. So long as the display dollars kept flowing into Sunnyvale in the billions, why worry?

Bloomberg came back with a reason why, 18 months later. In a recent report, Bloomberg cited some trends that have Wall Street pros muttering darkly about Yahoo:

Yahoo said June 18 that second-quarter sales will be at the middle to low end of its forecast because of slowing display growth.

Year-to-year sales growth in the category decelerated from 38 percent in the first quarter of 2006 to 20 percent in this year’s first quarter and less than 10 percent in the second quarter, estimates Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali, who is based in New York and rates the shares “buy.”

“We’re seeing some shifts,” Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said. “Advertisers have started to experiment with different forms of display advertising.”

Names like Facebook and MySpace have received some of the credit for picking where Yahoo has been fading. The next question: how long will co-founder and new CEO Jerry Yang want to stick it out as top executive, especially if Wall Street continues to exude a lack of confidence in the company’s once-touted display ad business?