While Facebook continues to grow at a modest rate, Wall Street types were dismayed by the unimpressive rate of that growth in a new earnings report, sending the stock price tumbling yet again. In other words, "Facebook is no Google," as one analyst put it.
The newest earnings report showed growth of 32 percent over last year, but that's nothing compared to the 107 percent revenue increase the previous year. After factoring out one-time payments for employee stock grants, the company showed 12-cents-per-share growth, which was slightly better than analysts were expecting, but still not impressive.
Meanwhile, the company is "still in the early days of building [the] monetization engine" that are "social ads." They've done some early testing to show that this new model of advertising, which incorporates friends' recommendations into targeted advertising, is more effective than traditional advertising or the existing banner ads on the site. Still, because they're new, no one can predict what they will mean, revenue-wise.
Facebook's stock closed yesterday at $26.84 and fell below $24 in late trading, which is the lowest it's been since their May 18 IPO when the shares were priced at $38 and quickly tanked, in part due to technical snafus at the stock exchange.
