It would be interesting to study who, exactly, bought Facebook stock over the last six months or so, triggering the company's shares to rise from $26.51 to $62.11 since July 24, according to USA Today. Was it its users, 62 percent of which now log on regularly? Or was it mostly shrewd investors, many of whom might not even have an account?
Perhaps Facebook will conduct a poll, one of many areas to which the company has branched since beginning existence as "The Facebook" (until Justin Timberlake suggested to "drop the 'the'"), along with trending news, advertising, and philanthropical promotion, to name a few.
Probably, it was the shrewd investor who profited from Facebook's rise. But perhaps not. After all, more than several news articles, including ones from this site, have documented evidence of Facebook's impending decline (especially in younger users). If those investors kept up with the popular news, they may have been dissuaded.
But they don't call them investors because they can read. They call them investors because they can read between the lines. Perhaps young users really are turning their back to social media in the form of Facebook. Even if that is still the case, the site has, whether intentionally or not, developed its hardcore base, evidenced by the aforementioned 62 percent of users who now log on regularly (a rise from the last time such figuers were calculated). I don't have the numbers on this, but I bet that usage rate is significantly higher than Twitter and other social media and/or dating sites. I wonder if it it's higher than more classic, but similarly popular websites like ESPN (which I log on to every day), the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.?
Another interesting tidbit to emerge from USA Today's tech update today was the smaller rise in Google shares, up 2.5 percent following the company's announced sale of Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. The rise is notable mostly because Google, as of late, hasn't been in the business of selling assets, but acquiring them. In the last eight months or so, for example, they've purchased 10 robotics/artificial intelligence companies, which, as you can imagine, don't come cheap. Keep in mind Google shares hover around $1000 for those of you reading this and dialing your stock broker at the same time.
