Facebook Snags 2 Key Upgrades With Much Higher Views

Youssef Squali of Cantor Fitzgerald also raised his price target to $100 from $92 on Wednesday. Two of the driving forces were a relatively attractive value of the equity and the company’s top position and mass reach with advertisers that can offer personalized marketing on a broad scale.

The Cantor Fitzgerald call also talked up Facebook’s ownership of WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus and Messenger. These can all be future drivers and revenue-enhancing tools for the company. In fact, it was expected that Instagram may directly and indirectly add $2.5 billion to sales in this year alone.

Cantor further sees Facebook leading the transition of marketing and ad spending as it is expected that Internet ad spending is expected to pass television ad and marketing by 2020. Part of this is being driven by video use on Facebook expanding, bringing on faster video advertising at the same time. Squali’s $100 price target may not be the best target out there, but it is above the consensus target.

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Facebook remains the king of social media and is the top media pick at Merrill Lynch. Given Instagram, Premium video and Graph Search capabilities, some analysts feel that the company can drive revenue growth even without a huge increase in advertising placement.

The Merrill Lynch analysts point to the fact that Facebook remains the top beneficiary of the adoption of mobile Internet trends, with total U.S. Internet time spent on Facebook and Messenger up 19.6% in May. Other key metrics continue to drive interest. A big help here is that no viable challengers seem to be anywhere in sight. Merrill Lynch pointed to positive monthly data use, easier growth comparisons and positive data on ad revenue drivers as the top catalysts.

Facebook also recently announced a willingness to share ad revenue to acquire premium content, a totally new avenue for the company — and to take content away from Google’s YouTube by offering contributors 55% of the revenue from ads that appear alongside videos. This is yet another step forward for the company as it builds a hedge to the social media train that at some point may hit critical mass.

The Merrill Lynch team raised its price target on the stock to $105 from $95, higher than the $97.33 consensus price target at the time.

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Facebook shares closed at $87.29 on Thursday, within a 52-week trading range of $62.21 to $89.40. It has taken a long time and was painful for part of the way, but Facebook’s debacle around its initial public offering sure seems like it is now water under the bridge. The successful move to mobile was just one large part of the driving force behind Facebook’s gain.

Facebook’s average (mean) target is $97.76, and its median analyst price target is $97.50. The absolute highest price target is the $120.00 target from Piper Jaffray.