One billion users a month. That equates to over 33 million per day and nearly 1.4 million every hour. To put that in perspective, it would take three days and six hours to receive the number of users that watched the Super Bowl in 2013. In fact, only 219.4 million American’s watched the Olympics in 2012. It would only take YouTube about six days and 13 hours to acquire that many visits to its site. Ok, I think you get the point. That’s an insane amount of users. Let’s dive in and look at three companies with huge user bases.
Because we already talked a little bit about YouTube above, let’s look at Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) . Google owns YouTube, which released numbers showing the magnitude of this statistic. One in every two people on the Internet will visit the site in a months period of time. Back to a Super Bowl statistic, YouTube will have ten Super Bowl audiences tuned in to its site on a monthly basis.
If YouTube were a country it would be the third largest country in the world — after only China and India. Generation C (the newest generation) spends 74% more time viewing YouTube videos on their smartphones than they did just one year ago. 76% of young adults (ages 18-34) own smartphones, and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) owns approximately 70% of the global smartphone market share with its Android devices.
So what is Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) doing for investors? Well, how about a stock returning 13.26% YTD and 26.9% over the past year? Gross margins are at 58.9%, and earnings per share have risen annually for ten years. Although its P/E would normally be considered high (25.2), Morningstar shows the industry average at 28.2. The company may not be considered cheap, but it is considered fairly priced by most investors with a FCF yield of 4.98%. Revenues have increased annually since 2003. This is no contemplating matter considering there are an estimated 4 billion views on YouTube every day.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) studies have varied a lot depending on what you look at. Some show the social media site with 1 billion total users, and others show 1 billion active monthly users. Many people question this as people create accounts for their pets, relatives that have passed, and their un-born children. The site does however have more than 50 million pages and 10 million aps. The site boasts 618 million daily users, 142 “friends” per user, and over 1.1 trillion likes from the time it was founded. 2.7 billion likes per day occur on this site. Ok, so those numbers are impressive, but what about the investment side of things?
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was recently voted as the best CEO of 2013. After an awful IPO, the stock has actually started to rebound in the past few months. It is still down 32.5% over the past year, but is up 2.4% YTD. In three years their revenues have increased nearly 258%, while its gross margins have dropped from 75% to 73.2%. The stock seems to be very expensive as its FCF yield is a dismal .61%. It’s not my ideal investment, but if someone out there finds it suitable for them, more power to them. I, quite honestly, don’t see any competitive advantage over other social media outlets such as Google + or Twitter.
