Zynga公司$1B IPO: Where’s the Facebook Bump?

Could the market hype swirling around social media darlings likeZynga公司会失去动力吗？

The largest maker of games forFacebookwas expected to go public this week with a valuation of as much as $20 billion. Instead, the company raised $1 billion.

Zynga公司is the largest and best known of the start-ups in the Facebook ecosystem, with popular games like “Mafia Wars,” “CityVille,” and “FarmVille.” There are dozens more game makers, some with valuations of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Whether the social media revolution is playing itself out remains to be seen. Despite Zynga’s lower-than-expected IPO yesterday, the company still receives a lot of luster from its association with Facebook. Indeed, an invitation to “log on with Facebook” indicates that for many of the social network’s 800 million users, a Facebook log-on is now tantamount to online identify itself, a passport to countless other sites that are eager to integrate themselves into Facebook’s ecosystem, orbiting like planets around a life-giving sun.

Facebook has joined the ranks of the great technology companies—such as Apple,谷歌,IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.—that are imposing new rules and business models on existing markets and sparking the creation of new markets and businesses that bear their stamp. It’s that power, even more than Facebook’s size, that accounts for the company’s stunning $70 billion private market valuation and the soaring value of the companies that are following in its wake.

“The excitement over Facebook reflects more than just its number of users or its revenue. The valuation reflects Facebook’s power as an Internet platform. That is what investors pay for,” says J.T. Treadwell, the veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and private equity investor who led Symphony Technology Group’s June acquisition of online price-comparison service Shopzilla.

他们付了很多钱。以Airbnb的估值为例，这是一个在线市场，允许人们像对待酒店一样对待自己的房子，将房间出租给陌生人。今年7月，风险投资公司andreessenhorowitz主导了一项1.12亿美元的B轮投资，据报道，这家成立3年的公司的估值为13亿美元。其他投资者包括杰夫·贝佐斯、阿什顿·库彻和俄罗斯风险投资公司Digital Sky Technologies，后者持有Facebook的大量股份。据说Airbnb今年有望创造2500万美元的收入。其13亿美元的估值是营收的52倍，而Facebook的估值约为17比1，谷歌的估值则不到6比1。在商业新闻网站Silicon Alley Insider 10月7日发布的100家最具价值初创企业排行榜上，Airbnb排名第16位。

How can Andreessen Horowitz justify those numbers? Part of the reason is that Airbnb is tightly integrated with Facebook. Users can log in with their Facebook IDs and share Airbnb comments via the Facebook platform. Imagine what a challenge it is to persuade people to rent rooms in strangers’ homes in distant cities. In such cases the recommendations of friends and peers can build the confidence necessary to making the market work. “Facebook has been a great source of new users for Airbnb. It has also helped to improve the transparency of user identities, increasing trust and safety in our community. It is a very important channel for us,” says Silicon Valley veteran Jeff Jordan, a founding eBay employee and current partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which was launched by Netscape Communications co-founder Marc Andreessen. “I think the opportunity is huge. Airbnb can be as big a company as Ebay is. It can do for lodging what Ebay did for auctions of goods,” Jordan adds.

社交influence is a valuable commodity. The views of family members, friends and peers can shape consumer behavior in ways that even advertising and marketing can’t match. Over the years many companies—from Amway Corp. to MCI Communications Corp.—looked for ways to monetize the weight of those social connections.

然后，Facebook出现了。社交网络的价值很大程度上来自于它前所未有的驾驭社交网络病毒的能力。它的用户不断地表达他们的好恶，听音乐，看视频，购物，并以无数其他方式采取行动。事实证明，这些网上表达的偏好有很大的经济价值，特别是在一个人可以影响另一个人的社交环境中。亚慱体育app

Those actions of Facebook users are increasingly shared and stored in a demographic treasure trove known as the Open Graph, a Facebook developer protocol that allows websites to integrate themselves with Facebook and draw information about users, photos, events, pages and all the other objects in the Facebook universe. As more websites join with Facebook, the Open Graph has the potential to become a search engine rivaling Google.

For the past ten years, the process of finding online information has been dominated by Google, which indexes data and documents across the Internet and makes them searchable by machine. Google uses mathematical algorithms to rank data and decide what is most relevant. Facebook is creating an alternative approach to searching, which differs from Google in two important ways. First, it expands the notion of what is searchable online to include peoples’ relationships to one another, their preferences for consumer goods and the events they attend. Second, instead of relying on mathematical models to rank information in order of importance, Facebook gives search results a social dimension: The things that people like become the most important or relevant. Thus social influence becomes a commodity that can be tracked, stored and valued. And that new ability is giving rise to a legion of start-ups.

在2008年中期st of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a San Francisco–based start-up called Eventbrite took off. The company, which allows people to create and sell tickets online, had gained enough traction after its 2006 launch to attract an initial round of venture capital. But something happened in 2008, when the annual total of tickets sold on the site suddenly doubled, to $50 million from $25 million in 2007, according to Tamara Mendelsohn, head of marketing. “At first, we weren’t sure why traffic was surging,” she recalls. An analysis showed that Eventbrite’s growth was driven by a sudden influx of referrals from Facebook, which had displaced Myspace as having the most unique monthly visitors in June 2008, according to internet market research outfit ComScore.

EventBrite发现，每次其成员使用Facebook邀请某人邀请某人活动，它导致了价值2.52美元的票价。根据MendelsoHN的说法，这比分布给Twitter上的人员的邀请价值高度高的邀请症的价值高近三倍。

Eventbrite很快将业务模式的重心重新放在Facebook和opengraph上，试图抓住社交影响力的价值。该公司最初的设计目的是与谷歌的电子邮件和日历工具集成。”门德尔松说，我们与Facebook合作，开放了他们的API或应用程序编程接口。

That shift allowed Eventbrite users to send invitations to all their Facebook friends with a single click. The economic payoff was immediate — and huge. Thanks in part to its integration with Facebook, Eventbrite is doubling its traffic every year. It expects to sell tickets with a face value of between $400 million and $500 million in 2011. That figure could hit $1 billion in 2012.

交通量的增加带来了更多的收入。Eventbrite不会公布其财务细节，但它表示，每售出一张票，就可以获得2.5%的佣金外加99美分。新商业模式的强大帮助该公司在前几轮融资3000万美元的基础上，于5月份融资5000万美元。Eventbrite正计划进行国际扩张，明年可能进行IPO。

Facebook is increasingly focused on developing itself as a platform, essentially outsourcing applications to third-party developers plugged into the Open Graph. That is creating huge opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors. “I wonder if three or four years from now there will be any core apps left on Facebook,” says Ian Hogarth, co-founder and CEO of London-based Songkick. Over the past three years, the concert sales company has emerged as a strong rival to Ticketmaster Entertainment. Songkick has raised more than $6 million to date from Index Ventures and other venture capital firms.

生态系统最广泛地包括Facebook，与平台集成的初创企业，营销公司，在Facebook和启用整个系统的技术人员，开发人员和投资者上广告。从投资者的角度来看，生态系统可以缩小到Facebook系统内运营的公司，允许他们的用户使用Facebook ID。

综合来看，Facebook生态系统中的应用程序开发商带来的收入可能几乎与Facebook本身一样多。2009年，一个关于互联网未来的在线讨论论坛“互联网进化”（Internet Evolution）估计，第三方Facebook开发者和初创企业当年将产生约5亿美元的收入，与Facebook当年带来的收入大致持平。如果这种模式持续下去，而且没有迹象表明它已经放缓了Facebook的发展速度，那么Facebook的开发者们就可以赶上该公司2011年预计的40亿美元收入。

更广泛地说,Facebook的增长及其ecosystem also may also have played a big part in the growth of venture capital investing over the past year. The value of venture money invested in the consumer information services sector—which includes online search, social media and entertainment—doubled, to $1.3 billion, in the third quarter from the comparable quarter of 2010, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, which reports on the venture capital industry. The total amount of venture capital invested in the consumer sector for the year already has hit $3.8 billion and is on track to easily surpass the $4.2 billion invested in 2010. Though it’s hard to establish cause and effect, it seems likely that the increase reflects the general level of excitement and optimism that Facebook has brought to the consumer Internet sector.

超大型初创企业正在吸引风险投资公司的早期投资，估值也比以往任何时候都高，这引发了一些担忧。”总部位于纽约的Zelkova Ventures联合创始人杰伊•利维（Jay Levy）问道：“问题是，‘平台’是新的泡沫吗？”。特别是，他想知道Facebook是否能够维持其估值和众多与其相关公司估值的增长。一些报道称，Facebook在美国的增长已经趋于平稳，公司的大部分扩张来自新的国际市场。”“Facebook有一种疲乏的成分，”他说随着人们的加入，会有一股兴奋和使用的冲动，但之后会变慢。”

如果Facebook的增长未能达到人们的崇高期望，Facebook的价值以及所有与之相关的公司都可能面临风险。利维指出，初创企业在筹集资金方面比上半年更为艰难；他表示，那些找到初始融资的公司的融资水平通常比今年的峰值低30%。

Those concerns have been fed by questionable accounting at Zynga, which has booked about half a billion dollars in revenue so far this year. But it has been amortizing revenue—that is, taking in a dollar of revenue and accounting for it a little bit at a time. Recently, it shortened its amortization schedule, allowing it to book more revenue per month and boosting 2011 revenue by $27 million.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of venture capitalists who are happy to stand by their investments in the Facebook ecosystem. Venture capital pioneer John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has described Zynga as one of the best investments the firm has ever made, right up there with Google and Amazon.com.

安德森-霍洛维茨（Andreessen-Horowitz）的合伙人乔丹（Jordan）称，从昨日的暴涨中看今天的估值是错误的。现在的互联网规模是上世纪90年代末的十倍，部分原因是更快的网络、新设备和允许人们在线生活的社交网站的兴起。

“What has changed is that companies are now able to grow faster than ever before because Internet usage is so much higher now than it was in the ’90s,” Jordan says. “And this growth has enabled companies to scale very quickly, and valuations have followed.”

最大的驱动力可能是Facebook本身，它在扩大互联网并使其更加普及方面发挥了关键作用。”“Facebook对我们的发展至关重要，”Index Ventures合伙人索尔•克莱恩（Saul Klein）表示，他是Songkick董事会的成员。他说，多亏了开放式图表的强大功能，“Facebook能够扫描朋友们正在听的音乐，并向我提出建议。”。

And investors believe that the social web—centered around Facebook—has given them the means to unlock the economic value of those relationships in a way that has never been done before.