More quarterly earnings from the big tech players like Facebook and Amazon came out this week. After the bell closed on Thursday, Amazon’s numbers fell short of Wall Street predictions, whereas Facebook earnings exceeded expectations. Even though numbers weren’t as expected for Amazon, there have been reports that it is in talks with PayPal for a potential acquisition. Amazon is estimated to make up 74.1% of all online sales, all good news for PayPal.
Meanwhile, important news about a WordPress vulnerability was made public this week. If you’re running a WordPress website, double check to make sure you’re running the latest version, 4.7.2. It is alleged that your site could be subject to vandalism and if not, other potential attacks, as outlined below. More news for developers – Google announced that the code for Chrome for iOS is now part of its Chromium open source project. Google hopes that this will improve the speed of Chrome for iOS. You can read more on that on TechCrunch.
In listing updates this week, we have just listed a new display advertising business with a total of 1.3 million visitors in 2016. If you’re more interested in SaaS, we are also featuring a sales CRM with more than $1250 in customer LTV, so be sure to check it out. Looking to browse further? Check out all of our listings here.
In event news, our CEO Ismael Wrixen is in Salt Lake City this weekend for a private meetup, so be sure to get in touch if you are in the area. Next week, Valuation Director, Chris Hiller, will be heading off to San Francisco to join the SaaS crowd at Saastr Annual. Founder, Thomas Smale, is also on the move – this time to Germany where he will be speaking at FemtoConf before flying to our Saigon office ahead of his speech at DCxSGN. If you plan on attending any of these events, or are in the area, let us know and we’ll connect you to Ismael, Thomas or Chris!
For more news on Facebook earnings and updates, Amazon’s plans to build an air cargo hub and details on the WordPress update, read below.
Deal Highlights
B2B SaaS – Sales CRM – $7.4K MRR
- 15.3% compound annual growth over the last six years
- $1250+ customer lifetime value
- Optimized funnel with 10% trial-to-paid conversion
- Eight years of stable history
- Strong 90%+ net margins
Yearly Net Profit: $80K
Asking Price: $292K
Display Advertising – Personal Development – $1.6K net/mo
- 1.3 million visitors in 2016
- High-quality backlink profile
- 37K keyword rankings
- 9% compound monthly growth rate
- Outsourced content creation
Yearly Net Profit: $19K
Asking Price: $44K
Sold
Affiliate Business – Sports and Outdoors – $5.7K net/mo
In the News…
WordPress Important Security Update
In a new WordPress update, all WordPress users are strongly encouraged to ensure they have installed the latest version (version 4.7.2) or they will be leaving their site vulnerable to a hijack. The vulnerability would allow an attacker to change content on a WordPress site. This could potentially introduce harmful links, malicious software or include the site in a phishing scam.
On January 20, security firm Sucuri, notified WordPress of their discovery. The information was not made public until now because WordPress wanted to resolve the issue first before bringing it to the press. Main hosting services and security companies were notified immediately. However, now that this is public knowledge, attackers could potentially target sites that have not updated the latest installation.
So if you’re running a WordPress site and don’t have automatic updates, be sure to install version 4.7.2.
Happy 13th Facebook
The numbers are out for Facebook Q4 2016 earnings, in time for its 13th birthday. Earning $8.81 billion in revenue and $1.41 EPS, Facebook gained 70 million monthly users, reaching 1.86 billion (a little slower growth compared to Q3 2016). Mobile ad revenue contributes 84% to total ad revenue which equates to $7.248 billion. Profit grew at 177% YoY, while revenue grew 51% YoY. Overall in 2016, Facebook earned $27.6 billion total revenue.
Facebook had predicted slower revenue growth because of limited ad space that is assumed will run out mid this year. The number of daily active users was up 18% YoY, with 66% retention of monthly users that come back every day.
In U.S. and Canada, it reached a $19.81 average revenue per user, which is a 44% YoY increase. Internationally, ARPU was up 29.5% YoY at $4.83 – earning about $20 per user per year.
Despite the fake news controversy and penalties, Facebook has been finding resourceful ways to maintain sustainable ad revenue, including its push towards video. During the earnings call, Facebook announced that it will pay up-front for videos and select premium content, hoping to naturally attract more viewers. Like YouTube, Facebook wants to focus on shorter-form content and establish a uniform place to hold the collection videos such as a video tab. It also plans to share ad revenue with video content creators, encouraging them to keep producing videos on the platform.
A more direct way of combating fake news is an algorithm change, or two in terms of Facebook’s News Feed. One algorithm update is a faster signal to improve prominence of news stories and the other update is ranking authentic content higher. Facebook will categorize Pages depending on how organic likes and engagement are and if spammy content exists on the page. If posts are hidden by users, Facebook will also factor that into authenticity. If there is a lot of recent engagements on a post or Page, Facebook will consider that topic important and improve visibility of the post. According to Facebook, it says these changes will have little impact to Pages, but encourages publishers to follow these guidelines or they will be penalized.
Yesterday, Facebook announced that it has improved its image search AI, which now lets users find images by content. Like Google Photos, users can search specific terms, which will bring them a collection of their own and other users’ photos relating to the search term. Through object recognition and analyzing billion of photos via deep-learning technology, Facebook is ultimately trying to understand what people (like you) are doing in their photos.
Although Facebook has been featured in the news cycle quite frequently in the past year – mostly from criticism – Zuckerberg certainly has been successfully pushing to stay on top.
Amazon is Building a Transport Hub
Amazon announced that it plans to build a new air cargo hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport in Kentucky. The hub will be home to the cargo airplanes that transport packages nationwide. It will cost $1.5 billion to build and potentially create nearly 2,000 new jobs. This better positions Amazon to control their sorting, shipping and delivering of packages. It currently depends on USPS, FedEx and UPS to deliver its packages. By handling their own shipping process and moving away from third-party services, it would lead to lower shipping costs for the e-commerce giant.
Some analysts believe that this move to expand their transport network has presented Amazon with a billion dollar market opportunity. Deploying 4,000 of its own trucks, leasing cargo airplanes, ocean freight shipping, and drone delivery options all contribute to creating a business of its own. Despite disappointing numbers from last quarter, the Amazon empire is imminent.