上周，Facebook的投资者们愤怒不已，该公司的承销商也极为尴尬，而批评者们则幸灾乐祸，我不禁被这样一个问题所困扰：假如说这么多投资者都不看好Facebook 的首次公开募股，认为估价过高，他们为何仍然十分看好商务社交网站LinkedIn？

    同Facebook 一样，LinkedIn是一家社交媒体先锋，打造了稳定增长且盈利的业务。通过建立一个社区，让人们之间定期互动，两家公司成为了社交网站中的翘楚。Facebook与LinkedIn都利用自身用户的个人资料赚钱。两家公司都是作为技术界最热门新领域的代表进军股票市场。

    两家公司都选择在5月中旬上市：Facebook是2012年，正值希腊债务危机和欧元区危机，投资者信心普遍备受打击之际；而LinkedIn则是2011年，当时希腊及欧元区问题也正如火如荼，市场信心同样不足。不过Facebook目前股价相比其发行价已下跌16%，而LinkedIn当前股价比发行价足足上涨了130%。

    当然，LinkedIn在IPO后也饱受挫折。LinkedIn在上市首日，股价便上涨超过100%，达到122.70美元，但仅一月之后，其股价迅速下挫，最低探至60.14美元。本月初，LinkedIn股价又重新回到120.63美元。换句话说，Facebook投资者们也许能从中看到自己股票一年之后咸鱼翻身的情形。但话说回来，这也并非板上钉钉之事。Facebook认股权证的投资者们正双倍买入看跌期权，很多人都下注该公司股票到12月将跌破每股22美元。

    这种看跌情绪也可以理解，鉴于Facebook发行价定为每股38美元，即公司估值相当于其年营收的26倍，相当于其年净利润额的100倍以上（目前这两个比例已分别下降至21倍和74倍）。不过LinkedIn目前市值相当于其营收的17倍，与其近期净利润相比，比例则高达700倍之多。Facebook目前股价较其上周五（5月18日）的发行价已大幅下跌24%，而同期LinkedIn股价仅下滑1%。

    Facebook股价下滑的主要原因是自己在首次公开发行上犯了愚蠢错误——向热门投资者们通告了较疲弱的增长预期，而这些数据来自Facebook自己和为了挽回颜面的证券分析师们，然后内部人士又宣布待售股票数量增多，同时提高发行价格。至于华尔街为什么在Facebook首次公开发行前对其股票给出“卖出”评级的，目前还不得而知。

    上周五，在开盘后最初几个小时，LinkedIn股价并未大幅波动。不过，随着刚刚上市的Facebook股票上涨无力之势愈加明显，LinkedIn股价也开始闻风下跌。LinkedIn在收盘时跌幅达到了6%，而Facebook股价较其发行价几乎原地踏步。其它互联网公司股票也受到Facebook拖累：社交游戏公司Zynga下跌了14%，团购网站Groupon和在线音乐服务商Pandora均下跌7%。从本周四的收盘情况看，自Facebook上市交易以来，LinkedIn的股价下跌了约1%，同时Pandora和Groupon的股价也下跌了1%左右。

    这种情况或许表明，投资者们开始意识到，Facebook不会波及其它近期IPO的互联网公司——除了Zynga，因为其营收严重依赖于Facebook。但这并不能解释为什么这些人会重新转向LinkedIn，一个市盈率要比Facebook高出许多的社交网站。

    原因可能在于投资者们注意到了其它因素：其中之一是LinkedIn的未来增长率要高于Facebook，甚至在Facebook非正式地公布其较低的营收指导前，LinkedIn仍要超出一截。在截止3月21日的上个季度，Facebook营收为10.6亿美元，增长45%。LinkedIn的营收增长率是Facebook两倍以上，达到101%，数额为1.88亿美元。

    Amid the anger this week of Facebook investors, the embarrassment of the company's underwriters and the schadenfreude of its detractors, a question has been bugging me: If so many investors are skeptical of Facebook's (FB) overvalued IPO, then why are they still so positive on LinkedIn (LNKD)?

    Like Facebook, LinkedIn is a social-media pioneer that has built up a steadily growing and profitable business. Both have achieved what few social networks have by creating a community of people who regularly interact with each other. Both exploit the personal data of their users to make money. Both entered the stock market as proxies for one of the hottest new areas in technology.

    And both went public in mid-May: Facebook in 2012, while concerns about Greece and the EU were weighting down broader markets; and LinkedIn in 2011, when concerns about Greece and the EU were weighting down broader markets. But Facebook is trading around 16% below its offering price, while LinkedIn has gained 130% from its offering price.

    Of course, LinkedIn also sagged after its initial debut. After more than doubling on its first day to $122.70, the stock had drifted down as far as $60.14 a month later. Earlier this month, LinkedIn had rallied back to $120.63. On the one hand, that may give hope to Facebook investors for a similar rebound over the next year. On the other, it may not. Investors in Facebook warrants are buying twice as many puts as calls, with many betting the stock will be below $22 a share by December.

    Such bearishness is understandable, given that Facebook's offering price of $38 a share valued the company at 26 times revenue and more than 100 times profits (it's now down to 21 times revenue and 74 times earnings). But LinkedIn is trading at 17 times its revenue and about 700 times its recent earnings. And while Facebook's stock has dropped 24% from its initial trading price last Friday, LinkedIn is down only 1% over the same period.

    Much of Facebook's slide is due to the ham-fisted bumbling of its IPO – notifying favored investors of weaker growth forecasts from the company and face-saving securities analysts, then announcing more shares for sale by insiders while lifting the offering price. Just how Wall Street managed to slap a sell rating on Facebook shares before the IPO is a tale yet to be told.

    Last Friday, LinkedIn's stock didn't move much for the first couple of hours. But once it became clear that Facebook's newly listed shares were faltering, LinkedIn began to fall, closing the day down 6% while Facebook closed largely unchanged from its offering price. Other web stocks also fell on the Facebook effect: Zynga (ZNGA) was down 14%, Groupon (GRPN) and Pandora (P) were both down 7%. And as of Thursday's close, LinkedIn is down about 1% since Facebook started trading, as are Pandora and Groupon.

    That may suggest that investor disenchantment in Facebook hasn't spread to other recent web IPOs -- except Zynga, since its revenue relies heavily on Facebook's fortunes. But it doesn't explain why investors would return to LinkedIn, when its PE is so much higher than that of Facebook's.

    The reason may be that investors are looking at other metrics, ones that suggest more future growth than Facebook was promising even before its (unofficially) lower guidance. In the quarter ended March 21, Facebook's revenue rose 45% to $1.06 billion. LinkedIn's grew more than twice as fast: 101% to $188 million.

    乍一看来，这样的比较简直风马牛不相及，因为从上季度来看，Facebook营收是LinkedIn的5.7倍。但请考虑以下两个因素：第一，仅仅一年前，Facebook营收还是LinkedIn的7.7倍。所以在一年的时间里，两者之前的差距已大大缩小。未来几年，Facebook将开始面临增长乏力的困扰，其增长率或将进一步下滑。

    第二，虽然LinkedIn的规模要小得多，但其每用户收入要高于Facebook。上个季度，LinkedIn的单用户月收入为1.83美元，Facebook只有1.17美元。过去一年，LinkedIn的每月活跃用户数量增长了37%，达到1,300万人，Facebook的增幅则为33%。

    可以说Facebook和LinkedIn的用户增速都比较理想。不过要说到从用户身上赚钱，LinkedIn显然更胜一筹。而投资者只需要知道：随着Facebook成长，从收入方面而言，其增长是不加选择的。Facebook主动接触那些对互相具有极大个人价值的用户，但这些用户对投资者而言却没有什么商业价值。

    而LinkedIn从每位用户身上赚到了更多的钱，尽管这些用户每个月在LinkedIn的社交网络上花的时间并没有达到8小时那么长。（有一项统计称，LinkedIn用户每月仅在该社交网络上花17分钟。）但LinkedIn充分挖掘了这些时间的商业价值——不是通过发布广告，而且通过招聘信息以及高级订阅，两者各占LinkedIn总收入的54% 和20%。展示广告和其他广告仅占LinkedIn总收入的26%。

    广告占Facebook总收入的82％。这是Facebook与LinkedIn之间的天壤之别。Facebook严重依赖广告。在从用户身上榨取广告收入这方面，Facebook比MySpace做的强得多，尽管如此，它仍是一家社交媒体网站。这意味着，在Facebook上，用户都是冲着内容来的，但他们不会点击广告。因此，通用汽车（General Motors）抛弃Facebook的消息传来后，没人感到意外。

    LinkedIn则从社交媒体网站转型为求职招聘网站。它契合了一条古老的谚语：社交媒体并非最终目标，而是一项用于特定战略的功能。为了达到这个目的，LinkedIn发掘了一个自己能深耕多年的市场，但Facebook却将几十亿美元都砸在了一个可能没有未来的平台上。（Twitter上有这么条消息：难道Facebook的成功不是建立在25岁以下的年轻人身上吗？我很想知道现在的Facebook是不是已经被说中了。）

    换句话说，如果LinkedIn是社交媒体版的书面简历，那Facebook是什么？是社交媒体版的高校自助餐厅吗？用户时刻要操心的是应该坐在哪张桌旁，谁会和自己一起进餐，又有哪些人自己不想和他进餐。

    两家网站都是大量感性化现实生活的写照。社交网站正是依靠人类情绪推动的。不过有一些情绪只属于的朦胧青春期，而另一些则来自于正在寻求自身定位的成年人。也就是说，有这么家社交网站，它的基础更接近人们成长的现实世界。

    难道Facebook上亿的社交媒体用户就不会长大成人吗？投资者们似乎认准了他们会成长。但至少在本周，投资者们将未来押在了LinkedIn上。

    本文作者凯文•凯莱赫是旧金山湾区的一位作家。欢迎随时访问他的Twitter账号cafeteria table on Twitter。

    译者：项航

    That might look like an apples-to-oranges comparison, because Facebook's revenue in the most recent quarter was 5.7 times that of LinkedIn's. But consider two things: First, that only one year earlier, Facebook's revenue was 7.7 times that of LinkedIn's. So in the space of one year, that gap has narrowed significantly. As Facebook begins to face limits to its growth in the next year or so, the ratio could shrink even more.

    And secondly, although LinkedIn is noticeably smaller, it's already getting more money from each user than Facebook. In the most recent quarter, LinkedIn took in $1.83 for every monthly user. Facebook took in $1.17. The number of LinkedIn's monthly active users grew 37% to 13 million over the past year. At Facebook, the number grew 33%.

    So the number of users are growing comparably fast on both Facebook and LinkedIn. But as they do, LinkedIn is doing a better job of getting revenue from each user. And that's all investors need to know: As Facebook grows, it grows -- from a revenue standpoint -- indiscriminately. It reaches out to users who offer much personal value to each other, but little monetary value to Facebook investors.

    LinkedIn, meanwhile, makes more money from each of its users even if they don't spend eight hours per month on its social network. (By one count, it's only 17 minutes per month.) But LinkedIn has managed to mine those precious minutes for all they're worth--– not through serving ads, but through job postings and premium subscriptions, which account for 54% and 20%, respectively, of LinkedIn revenue. Display and other ads only account for 26% of LinkedIn revenue.

    But ads account for 82% of Facebook revenue. And that's the real apples-oranges difference between Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook relies heavily on advertising. And even though it's done a much better job of wringing ad revenue from its users than MySpace, it's still a social media company. Which means, on Facebook, people come for the content, but they don't click on the ads. That's why no one was surprised to hear that General Motors (GM) was disenchanted with Facebook.

    LinkedIn, meanwhile, turned its social network into a job-hunting and recruitment site. It took the old adage that social media isn't a destination but a feature directed at a specific strategy. In doing so, it found a market it can serve for years, while Facebook invested billions in a platform that could be irrelevant tomorrow. (This single tweet made me wonder if that wasn't already happening: Didn't Facebook build its success on listening to people under 25?)

    Put another way, LinkedIn is the social-media version of a printed-out resume. Facebook is the social media version of... what, a high-school cafeteria? Where you worry about whose table to sit at, who will eat with you and who you don't want to eat with?

    Both of those are real-life situations with a lot of emotion to them. And social networks are driven by nothing if not by human emotion. But some of those emotions are about being an adolescent, and others are about being an adult finding one's place in the world. That is, one of these social networks is more grounded in the real world where people grow up.

    Will the hundreds of millions of social media users grow up? Investors seem to be betting they will. They are – this week at least – pinning the future on LinkedIn.

    Kevin Kelleher is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. You are always welcome to sit at hiscafeteria table on Twitter.