We are seeing something of a mini dot-com bubble bursting as market forces have been taking the weakest social media down since mid-2015. Which Web 2.0 companies have already seen their lows, and which could continue down?
What just happened to LinkedIn Corp. (NYSE: LNKD) serves as a warning for all shareholders of companies built on unrealistic dreams of fantastic growth. It also makes you wonder why executives even try spinning negative results positively because it clearly doesn’t work. Did framing LinkedIn’s latest quarter as “strong” with “solid progress” prevent shares from collapsing even more on Friday morning, February 5? Would they have collapsed by 60% instead of 50%?
Unfortunately for LinkedIn, it reported its unimpressive earnings during a very edgy time on Wall Street, when global markets seem to be worried about everything simultaneously and don’t have the emotional energy to lift their hopes for struggling social media darlings. Earnings guidance wasn’t great, but at $0.55 a share it’s not horrible either. This is just a sad case of overblown expectations on Wall Street’s part rather than a spectacular failure on LinkedIn’s part.
The company isn’t dying and looks like it eventually will be profitable. Speculation just got ahead of itself here, carried away by Facebook-like fantasies. The stock likely will bottom along with the rest of the market when the current bearish sentiment passes. Could it meet new all-time lows at $60? If the company were actually failing, then yes. But it isn’t, so probably not, given that expectations have now been totally rewritten and now more closely resemble reality.
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Twitter
Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) is already setting new lows almost daily now. At a certain price, it becomes too attractive as a buyout target to go any lower, and the fact that traders know this means that there is a floor somewhere, no matter how bad things get. Twitter doesn’t look like it will become profitable any time soon, unlike LinkedIn, which looks to at least be going in the right direction. So if there is no turnaround soon, there likely will be a buyout. How much are 320 million monthly active users worth? Right now it’s around $30 in capital value by the stock price. Whoever thinks he can make over $30 in lifetime profit per user from Twitter’s user base can buy it now. It may make new lows, but only marginally for that reason.
MeetMe
MeetMe Inc. (NASDAQ: MEET) had a better 2015 than most stocks, let alone Web 2.0 stocks. Top-line growth is trudging along in fits and starts, but it looks like this social media baby at least has its costs under control. Last quarter was an exception due to a write-off of bad debt from a media publisher called Beanstock that didn’t pay up. Lesson learned there, and MeetMe should continue to eke out small profits each quarter. It looks like the bottom is in for this small but efficient dot-com.
Easily the king of all social media, and queen of the entire Internet if we count Alphabet as king, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) will never see its lows again, barring nuclear Armageddon. The next banking crisis, whenever that is, could bring it down to 2015 lows, however, say around $75 a share in a worst case scenario.
Angie’s List
This form of local Consumer Reports/Better Business Bureau through crowd-sourced reviews is slowly clawing its way to break even. The situation with Angie’s List Inc. (NASDAQ: ANGI) is something between MeetMe and LinkedIn. Expectations got out of hand early on in 2013 and have since settled down, and now the company is growing, and it may finally make it to break even in 2016. Volatile markets are still dangerous for this stock and it could find new lows depending on market conditions, but they are not too far below where we are now, and the upside is much larger.
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Groupon
We are right at the door of new all-time lows at $2.23 a share, and we could get there and a bit lower too with Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN). The business model doesn’t seem to work, the company cannot pull a profit, but the service is still quite popular. Much like Twitter, there is a floor here at which point some other company will offer a premium for it to gain access to its sizable user base. That floor can’t be much farther down than we already are, considering companies like Alphabet have already made offers six times its current market cap. Groupon won’t get that kind of offer again unless it can turn around, but going much lower than it is now is difficult to imagine.
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