Last night just before 12 a.m., Twitter began exploding with the news: Facebook had raised $500 million — from Goldman Sachs. Bolstered by a $50-million stake from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, a previous FB investor, the Wall Street behemoth had slapped down $450 million to snag the Internet behemoth — now valued at a cool $50 billion. As if on cue, the internet noted that yes, that was cooler than a million dollars.
Notes the NYT’s Dealbook, which broke the scoop: this makes Facebook “worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.” It also doubles Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-billion-dollar worth. It also makes Goldman Sachs the gatekeeper to who now gets to invest in the super-hot Facebook, and to the inevitable Facebook IPO. According to Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn Rusli, Goldman is “planning to create a ’special purpose vehicle’ to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, which would allow for max investment while circumventing disclosure rules for companies with 500 or more investors. Clever, that.
So: This is a big deal. Everyone’s already saying that this is putting Google even more on the ropes (seeing as now Facebook is the most visited website in the land) and that Goldman couldn’t be sitting prettier. Here are a few other things it means:
(1) Facebook hiring spree! To paraphrase Antoine Dodson, hide your startups, hide your engineers — Facebook’s a-comin’. Snapping up Hot Potato and Drop.io? Poaching Foursquare’s Nathan Folkman? That’s nothing compared to what Facebook’s got coming. Rumor has it they’re about to close on purchasing the Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park from Oracle. That’s probably not just for the scenery. They want to stock up, preferably with talent – and, importantly, companies – that will help it integrate across every platform possible. (I’m guessing one of the new buzzy photo apps will be snapped up.) If you think people are complaining about a developer shortage now, just wait.
(2) China! Mark Zuckerberg recently returned from a trip to China. Innocent pleasure jaunt for the Mandarin-speaking Facebook founder or connection-making relationship-building fact-finding mission to the land of 450 million potential users? China is certainly not an easy place to do business — they just kicked out Skype — but in a globalized, connected world, it’s certainly tough to ignore. Approximately 33% of its massive population is online and as we all know from the rest of the world, that is growing. It’s an insane market to ignore and smart, Mandarin-speaking audacious visionary CEOs probably aren’t going to shy away from trying. Facebook China. It’s gonna happen.
(3) Goldman’s PR Whitewash The Vampire Squid just attached itself to the buzziest, growing-est, Oscar-nominated-est, Person Of The Year-iest tech company around. Who will remember their year of scandal and record bonuses and how everyone hated Goldman Sachs (sample Gawker headline: “Who do you hate more, BP or Goldman Sachs?“). Goldman’s not there for you to like them, people, they’re there to make money — lots of it. But they did have a bruising year and being attached to the shining future-makers at Facebook (never mind the gatekeeper to the Facebook IPO) will certainly help. This lets them offer something shiny to their clients, and bask in that reflected glow. (And guaranteed cashola.) That doesn’t fool the people who know — I like Howard Lindzon’s take:
For Goldman Sachs, this is a no lose situation. If it works, they get the IPO and make some money. That is their job. They got off so easy with the government that this is like Vegas money they probably thought would be the taxpayer’s at some point a year back…The only thing I DO know is that Goldman could give a rat’s ass about the social web and sharing. If they are the top in social web, it’s small potatoes. The war in bonds, currencies and commodities is where the real money is at. This is play money. I hate that Facebook is letting them in.
This is not a coup for Goldman Sachs, this is a shame for the social web.
Okay I lied. I love Howard Lindzon’s take. So, maybe Goldman’s got an uphill PR sell. But — they’ve also got Facebook. Watch the narrative change.
(4) Bigger Players, Bigger Bets When Lindzon points out that this is small potatoes for Goldman, he’s not kidding. But now the bigger fish are sniffing around and what started as mutterings about a bubble somewhere in the late fall now seems to be turning into a gold rush. (Doesn’t Google and their adorable $6 billion offer for Groupon seem so quaint right now? Never mind Twitter’s recent $3.7 billion valuation.) These are billion-dollar figures, and they are actually now starting to sound…eensy. As Ray Kurzweil points out, when technology advances it does so exponentially — so it makes sense that the explosion of tech startups would chicken-egg in conjunction with an explosion of investor dollars — not just the usual (and educated!) suspects, but people on the sidelines reading about Facebook in their Time magazines and deciding that maybe the Internet’s not a fad, after all. (Yes. These people do exist, and many of them have a LOT of money.) High valuations, big deals, young companies getting scooped up — it’s gonna be a dizzying year.
(5) Sympathy For The Google. It’s official: Facebook has gone from underdog challenger of the mighty Google to the top social-tech dog. So watch for everyone to start rooting for Google again. After a wave of backlash (see here and here), the pendulum will swing back around to rooting for the loveable search giant with the cuddly name. Google can take your pity – its market valuation is almost four times Facebook’s at $190 billion, and its current year revenue is about $22 billion to Facebook’s $2 billion. Back to Lindzon: “I think that Google has to buy Twitter and that will start to be a meme soon. It’s a chess game and nuclear war now in the social space.” That sound you hear is the sound of the tech press collectively wetting itself. Ew. But still — everyone likes to root for an exciting matchup. Expect to see some bold moves from Google, soon — if they’re smart. Big “if” (RIP Google Buzz). But isn’t that how underdogs like it?
(6) New Facebook Ad Models. All that said…Facebook has made a big point about how it hasn’t really focused on the silliness of “making money” yet, despite that $2 billion annual rev and nearly 1 trillion display ads per year. I believe them — can they really not do better than targeted ads for Jewish singles in your area? You bet they can: They also make a point about knowing every little bit of information about you for the ultimate in micro-targeting. The online ad industry is evolving and innovating right along with the rest of the web (see AdKeeper) and the key to dominating going forward will be data — using it wisely to convert your users into dollars for advertisers. This is where smart technology will take user data and figure out how to map it on top of shopping data, so that purchasing intent can best be harvested. The stigma about buying online has now pretty much disappeared. With more people using the web, and mobile devices, more often do run more of their lives, there are big bucks at stake. And I’m not even TALKING about how Facebook is looking to horn in on search.
(7) New Facebook Business Models. They have all these users. All this data. They’d be crazy just to stick with what they’ve got. Hell, now they’ve got fun money just to fling up into the air and see where it goes. They’re poaching the best and brightest who all gush on and on about how “exciting” and “creative” and “free” it is. Clearly these people are getting to work on some fun stuff. So far Facebook has shown itself as adept at replicating the innovations of its competitors (see: Foursquare –> Facebook Places). But with all the resources at their disposal and innovations happening across every industry on every platform, they’d be nuts not to at least test the waters. Hey, that car’s not gonna drive itself. Oh, wait.
(8) People Generally Freaking Out This has already started to happen. First Groupon (“What? But they AREN’T EVEN A TECH COMPANY!!!”) and now Super-Sized Facebook. Entrepreneurs and founders and people with fledgling ideas that are half-built that they’ve been slaving over at night are obsessing about all day are suddenly freaking out that they have to get to market NOW before the bubble pops and the money dries up. Chill out, dude. (And, ladies!) If you’re making something of value, it’ll take. Just focus on it, be smart, and don’t let Twitter and TechCrunch freak you out. (Here, take some advice from these people.) Just a moment of Zen amidst the craziness. All right, now – onward! It’s 2011 and YOU’D BETTER NOT SCREW THIS UP. Haa, just kidding. Mostly.
Well: It should be interesting. Happy New Year, everybody!
Related:
Goldman’s Facebook Coup [Felix Salmon - Reuters]
The Social Web Index … All-Time Highs in Pressure and Price and Shame on Facebook [Howard Lindzon]
Was Goldman wise to invest $500m in Facebook at a $50B valuation? [Quora]
Goldman Sachs Just Bought The Facebook IPO [Business Insider]
Follow Rachel Sklar on Twitter here.
Illustration of Mark Zuckerberg as Avatar-ized Time Person of the Year from Sandbox World (via Boing Boing) (hat tip: Bnter).
Follow us on Twitter.
Sign up for Mediaite’s daily newsletter.
The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur filling in for Ed Schultz talked to former Labor Secretary under President Clinton Robert Reich about the recent request by U.S. companies for a tax holiday on the over $1 trillion in assets they have sitting offshore.
Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Multinational Cash:
At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.
The money -- including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. companies attribute to overseas subsidiaries to avoid taxes -- is supposed to be taxed at up to 35 percent when it’s brought home, or “repatriated.” Executives including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.
What nobody’s saying publicly is that U.S. multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid that tax. Over the years, they’ve brought cash home, tax-free, employing strategies with nicknames worthy of 1970s conspiracy thrillers -- including “the Killer B” and “the Deadly D.”
Read on...
Uygur asked Reich what solutions there are when we have one party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business as the Republicans are and too many Democrats willing to feed off of the same trough. Reich pointed to the obvious, which is campaign finance reform.
Transcript below the fold.
Cenk Uygur and Robert Reich on Corporate Tax Avoidance and the Need for Campaign Finance Reform
UYGUR: But we start tonight with the request by corporate America for a tax break for over $1 trillion they have sitting off shore. In a meeting with president, they asked for a tax holiday so that they can bring the money back into the country without paying their full share of taxes.
I love the terms they use. Wouldn’t you like to take a holiday from your taxes?
When big business does it, it’s not tax evasion, its tax avoidance. I’m sure we’d all like to avoid our taxes, but we don’t have the lobbying power of multinational corporations behind us. And we don’t have a whole political party devoted to making us richer. In case you’ve been living in a cave in the last 30 years, that would be the Republican Party.
Companies are playing a shell game, aided and abetted by the GOP, where they take money in and out country, depending on our tax laws, to make it appear as if they really didn’t make any money here. One common trick is to say that they made all their money in Bermuda, where they have to pay almost no taxes, but that all of their costs were here. Very convenient, of course.
So, in the end, we have a situation where ExxonMobil made $70 -- I’m sorry, $37.3 billion in profits in 2009 and paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes. Bank of America made $4.4 billion in profits, and not only did they pay nothing in taxes, the U.S. government owes them $1.9 billion.
I don’t know how they do that.
And GE, the parent company of MSNBC, in full disclosure, made pretax profits of $10.3 billion and somehow has a tax credit of $1.1 billion.
So I paid more taxes last year than the company that owns all of this? Now, does that mean the companies are unpatriotic and immoral? No.
You see, the most important thing to understand is that companies don’t have nationalities and they don’t have morals. They’re not immoral actors, they’re amoral machines. They’re profit-making robots.
They’re not allowed to have a soul or have feelings. If an executive paid the company’s full taxes out of his patriotic duty, he’d be removed from his post. That’s not how it works.
And remember, Google’s whole mantra is, "Don’t be evil." And they avoided $3.1 billion in taxes in the last three years by doing these same kinds of tax tricks.
Why? Because they’re legally bound to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
When we had a ban on companies doing business with Iran, Halliburton set up an office in Tehran, Iran. They did it anyway. Their CEO at the time was this man. You might remember him. He’s Dick Cheney.
Later, Halliburton would move its official headquarters to Dubai to avoid U.S. taxes, while continuing to rake in huge contracts from the American government as a so-called American company.
So what’s the answer?
First, we have to recognize the problem. Politicians who talk about being "pro-business" are usually using it as an excuse to give corporations tax breaks. By the way, some of which gets funneled back to him in the form of campaign donations.
So let’s get this straight. No one’s anti-business. We want our big and small companies to do well so they hire more people. But at the same time, we don’t want people using the excuse of being pro-business to funnel our tax dollars to multinational corporations.
Most of those guys that are doing the hiring, these so-called American companies, are doing it abroad anyway. Look, the Economic Policy Institute says that American companies created less than a million jobs here in the U.S., but created 1.4 million jobs overseas last year. So you can see where their priorities are.
If we give a tax break to a company, it must be to specifically create jobs here, period. If they don’t, they can go get their tax break from Bermuda or Singapore.
No more American taxpayer money to finance multinational corporations. There has to be a separation of business and state.
This is not the United States of corporate America. Our representatives in this democracy are supposed to look out for us, their voters, not their corporate benefactors.
Secondly, we have to get much tougher on enforcing our tax laws.
In 2004, the Bush administration allowed, again, so-called American companies to repatriate $312 billion back into the U.S. at the comically low rate of 5.25 percent. The real corporate tax rate is supposed to be 35 percent.
Now do you see why the corporate world loved Bush? That means all of the executives at those companies got much fatter bonuses that year.
We did the Republican strategy of just trusting big business to create jobs with all of those tax breaks that we gave them, and guess what happened? Since that huge 2004 tax break, we have lost nearly seven million jobs.
Would you trust your personal money with an amoral machine? No way, right? Then why do we all trust our collective money with these guys? It’s time we built a wall between business and state so that our government looks out for our interests and not multinational corporations` interests.
Now, get your cell phones out. I want to know what you think.
Tonight’s text survey is: Do you think tax breaks for corporations lead to more U.S. jobs? Text "A" for yes, text "B" for no to 622639. I’ll bring you the results later in the show.
Now joining me is former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. He’s a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and he’s also the author of "Aftershock."
All right, Secretary Reich, I want to play you a clip by President Obama, because there was a bill introduced earlier in the year to actually stop the subsidies for off-shoring jobs, and it didn’t pass. The Republicans killed it.
And here’s what the president had to say about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Republicans in Washington claimed to draw their ideas from a Web site called America Speaking Out. It turns out that one the ideas that’s drawn the most interest on their Web site is ending tax breaks for companies that ship overseas.
The funny thing is, when we recently closed one of the most egregious loopholes for companies creating jobs overseas, Republicans in Congress were almost unanimously opposed. The Republican Leader, John Boehner, attacked us for it and stood up for outsourcing instead of American workers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UYGUR: Secretary, is that right? I mean, that seems so unbelievably egregious.
ROBERT REICH, FMR. LABOR SECRETARY: Well, Cenk, when you said a moment ago that this is the United States of corporate America, or at least that’s what it seems, that’s egregious enough.
I mean, big corporations are arguing in terms of getting more tax breaks or getting a tax holiday that they need it in order to have an incentive to create jobs in the United States. But most big corporations now have plenty of money.
Corporate profits are higher than they’ve been in years. In fact, big corporations are now sitting on almost a trillion dollars worth of cash. They’re not creating jobs in the United States, they’re creating jobs abroad.
UYGUR: So the fact that they kill a bill that would have stopped, you know, the loophole that allows them to get a subsidy for off-shoring, I mean, I feel like that’s such a no-brainer for the Democrats, I almost want to pull a Jon Stewart and just do this whole show and the next show and the next show after that about that.
How did the Democrats blow that? Why don’t they take advantage of that and tell the American people what’s happening?
REICH: Well, there are a lot of no-brainers for the Democrats when it comes to corporate malfeasance or nonfeasance.
Cenk, one of the problems -- and I don’t want to tar all Democrats with this, but at least some Democrats with regard to campaign donations are drinking at the same trough as Republicans. They’re going to big corporations.
Now, earlier this year, the Supreme Court, you’ll remember, said in one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, in Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission, that corporations are people and they’re entitled to provide as much money to campaigns and to politicians as they want. Otherwise, their First Amendment rights would be breached.
Well, you can’t have it both ways. You said it earlier, and I agree with you, that corporations are not people. They’re just machines. They are just designed to maximize profits.
If we actually treat them as people and say they have First Amendment rights to undermine and corrupt our politicians and our political process, then we’re really in trouble, because they don’t really represent America and Americans.
UYGUR: Well, they keep calling them American companies, or even corporate America. But do these so-called American companies have any obligation to America?
REICH: Well, unfortunately, they don’t. I mean, these global corporations have a primary obligation under the law, and also in terms of economics to their shareholders, to maximize shareholder returns.
That’s what under American capitalism corporations are supposed to do. They’re not obligated to maximize jobs. And it turns out these days, the most rapidly growing markets are in China, India, Brazil, several other rapidly growing markets, and so American corporations are over there not only selling but also creating jobs. Not here.
UYGUR: You know, the thing is, I don’t want people to get me wrong. I actually don’t think that’s crazy or bad. I get why businesses want to start factories in China and why they’re using India for labor, et cetera. I understand that. But what drives me crazy is the idea that we should be subsidizing that.
REICH: Exactly. Cenk, I couldn’t agree with you more.
In other words, corporations should be, according to the way we organize capitalism, maximizing shareholder returns, maximizing profits. So they should be going all over the world. But there is no reason for us, taxpayers, to be subsidizing those corporations, and then those corporations taking those subsidies, or those tax breaks, and using them for creating jobs all over the world. It makes no sense at all.
UYGUR: Unfortunately, I’m going to have to ask you the question that we always run into here. What can we do about it? Because the seems like the politicians, honestly, a lot in both parties -- certainly the Republicans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational corporations, but the Democrats are partly owned, as you explained.
How do we get beyond it when they have already bought the politicians?
REICH: Well, what we have to, I think all of us, get serious about campaign finance reform. I mean, eyes glaze over. It’s not an exciting topic. We’d much rather talk about holding on to health care and everything else. But unless we actually stem the flow of corporate money into American politics, everything we want to do, everything we believe in is jeopardized.
UYGUR: Secretary Reich, thank you so much for joining us.
REICH: Thanks, Cenk. Happy New Year.
UYGUR: Happy New Year to you, too.
robert shumake detroit
<b>News</b> Corp. Online Gaming Head Sean Ryan to Head Facebook's Social <b>...</b>
Sean Ryan, who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources. Currently, Facebook does not create social games, ...
500 More Red-Wing Blackbirds Found Dead in - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
robert shumake detroit
<b>News</b> Corp. Online Gaming Head Sean Ryan to Head Facebook's Social <b>...</b>
Sean Ryan, who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources. Currently, Facebook does not create social games, ...
500 More Red-Wing Blackbirds Found Dead in - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
robert shumake
Last night just before 12 a.m., Twitter began exploding with the news: Facebook had raised $500 million — from Goldman Sachs. Bolstered by a $50-million stake from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, a previous FB investor, the Wall Street behemoth had slapped down $450 million to snag the Internet behemoth — now valued at a cool $50 billion. As if on cue, the internet noted that yes, that was cooler than a million dollars.
Notes the NYT’s Dealbook, which broke the scoop: this makes Facebook “worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.” It also doubles Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-billion-dollar worth. It also makes Goldman Sachs the gatekeeper to who now gets to invest in the super-hot Facebook, and to the inevitable Facebook IPO. According to Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn Rusli, Goldman is “planning to create a ’special purpose vehicle’ to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, which would allow for max investment while circumventing disclosure rules for companies with 500 or more investors. Clever, that.
So: This is a big deal. Everyone’s already saying that this is putting Google even more on the ropes (seeing as now Facebook is the most visited website in the land) and that Goldman couldn’t be sitting prettier. Here are a few other things it means:
(1) Facebook hiring spree! To paraphrase Antoine Dodson, hide your startups, hide your engineers — Facebook’s a-comin’. Snapping up Hot Potato and Drop.io? Poaching Foursquare’s Nathan Folkman? That’s nothing compared to what Facebook’s got coming. Rumor has it they’re about to close on purchasing the Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park from Oracle. That’s probably not just for the scenery. They want to stock up, preferably with talent – and, importantly, companies – that will help it integrate across every platform possible. (I’m guessing one of the new buzzy photo apps will be snapped up.) If you think people are complaining about a developer shortage now, just wait.
(2) China! Mark Zuckerberg recently returned from a trip to China. Innocent pleasure jaunt for the Mandarin-speaking Facebook founder or connection-making relationship-building fact-finding mission to the land of 450 million potential users? China is certainly not an easy place to do business — they just kicked out Skype — but in a globalized, connected world, it’s certainly tough to ignore. Approximately 33% of its massive population is online and as we all know from the rest of the world, that is growing. It’s an insane market to ignore and smart, Mandarin-speaking audacious visionary CEOs probably aren’t going to shy away from trying. Facebook China. It’s gonna happen.
(3) Goldman’s PR Whitewash The Vampire Squid just attached itself to the buzziest, growing-est, Oscar-nominated-est, Person Of The Year-iest tech company around. Who will remember their year of scandal and record bonuses and how everyone hated Goldman Sachs (sample Gawker headline: “Who do you hate more, BP or Goldman Sachs?“). Goldman’s not there for you to like them, people, they’re there to make money — lots of it. But they did have a bruising year and being attached to the shining future-makers at Facebook (never mind the gatekeeper to the Facebook IPO) will certainly help. This lets them offer something shiny to their clients, and bask in that reflected glow. (And guaranteed cashola.) That doesn’t fool the people who know — I like Howard Lindzon’s take:
For Goldman Sachs, this is a no lose situation. If it works, they get the IPO and make some money. That is their job. They got off so easy with the government that this is like Vegas money they probably thought would be the taxpayer’s at some point a year back…The only thing I DO know is that Goldman could give a rat’s ass about the social web and sharing. If they are the top in social web, it’s small potatoes. The war in bonds, currencies and commodities is where the real money is at. This is play money. I hate that Facebook is letting them in.
This is not a coup for Goldman Sachs, this is a shame for the social web.
Okay I lied. I love Howard Lindzon’s take. So, maybe Goldman’s got an uphill PR sell. But — they’ve also got Facebook. Watch the narrative change.
(4) Bigger Players, Bigger Bets When Lindzon points out that this is small potatoes for Goldman, he’s not kidding. But now the bigger fish are sniffing around and what started as mutterings about a bubble somewhere in the late fall now seems to be turning into a gold rush. (Doesn’t Google and their adorable $6 billion offer for Groupon seem so quaint right now? Never mind Twitter’s recent $3.7 billion valuation.) These are billion-dollar figures, and they are actually now starting to sound…eensy. As Ray Kurzweil points out, when technology advances it does so exponentially — so it makes sense that the explosion of tech startups would chicken-egg in conjunction with an explosion of investor dollars — not just the usual (and educated!) suspects, but people on the sidelines reading about Facebook in their Time magazines and deciding that maybe the Internet’s not a fad, after all. (Yes. These people do exist, and many of them have a LOT of money.) High valuations, big deals, young companies getting scooped up — it’s gonna be a dizzying year.
(5) Sympathy For The Google. It’s official: Facebook has gone from underdog challenger of the mighty Google to the top social-tech dog. So watch for everyone to start rooting for Google again. After a wave of backlash (see here and here), the pendulum will swing back around to rooting for the loveable search giant with the cuddly name. Google can take your pity – its market valuation is almost four times Facebook’s at $190 billion, and its current year revenue is about $22 billion to Facebook’s $2 billion. Back to Lindzon: “I think that Google has to buy Twitter and that will start to be a meme soon. It’s a chess game and nuclear war now in the social space.” That sound you hear is the sound of the tech press collectively wetting itself. Ew. But still — everyone likes to root for an exciting matchup. Expect to see some bold moves from Google, soon — if they’re smart. Big “if” (RIP Google Buzz). But isn’t that how underdogs like it?
(6) New Facebook Ad Models. All that said…Facebook has made a big point about how it hasn’t really focused on the silliness of “making money” yet, despite that $2 billion annual rev and nearly 1 trillion display ads per year. I believe them — can they really not do better than targeted ads for Jewish singles in your area? You bet they can: They also make a point about knowing every little bit of information about you for the ultimate in micro-targeting. The online ad industry is evolving and innovating right along with the rest of the web (see AdKeeper) and the key to dominating going forward will be data — using it wisely to convert your users into dollars for advertisers. This is where smart technology will take user data and figure out how to map it on top of shopping data, so that purchasing intent can best be harvested. The stigma about buying online has now pretty much disappeared. With more people using the web, and mobile devices, more often do run more of their lives, there are big bucks at stake. And I’m not even TALKING about how Facebook is looking to horn in on search.
(7) New Facebook Business Models. They have all these users. All this data. They’d be crazy just to stick with what they’ve got. Hell, now they’ve got fun money just to fling up into the air and see where it goes. They’re poaching the best and brightest who all gush on and on about how “exciting” and “creative” and “free” it is. Clearly these people are getting to work on some fun stuff. So far Facebook has shown itself as adept at replicating the innovations of its competitors (see: Foursquare –> Facebook Places). But with all the resources at their disposal and innovations happening across every industry on every platform, they’d be nuts not to at least test the waters. Hey, that car’s not gonna drive itself. Oh, wait.
(8) People Generally Freaking Out This has already started to happen. First Groupon (“What? But they AREN’T EVEN A TECH COMPANY!!!”) and now Super-Sized Facebook. Entrepreneurs and founders and people with fledgling ideas that are half-built that they’ve been slaving over at night are obsessing about all day are suddenly freaking out that they have to get to market NOW before the bubble pops and the money dries up. Chill out, dude. (And, ladies!) If you’re making something of value, it’ll take. Just focus on it, be smart, and don’t let Twitter and TechCrunch freak you out. (Here, take some advice from these people.) Just a moment of Zen amidst the craziness. All right, now – onward! It’s 2011 and YOU’D BETTER NOT SCREW THIS UP. Haa, just kidding. Mostly.
Well: It should be interesting. Happy New Year, everybody!
Related:
Goldman’s Facebook Coup [Felix Salmon - Reuters]
The Social Web Index … All-Time Highs in Pressure and Price and Shame on Facebook [Howard Lindzon]
Was Goldman wise to invest $500m in Facebook at a $50B valuation? [Quora]
Goldman Sachs Just Bought The Facebook IPO [Business Insider]
Follow Rachel Sklar on Twitter here.
Illustration of Mark Zuckerberg as Avatar-ized Time Person of the Year from Sandbox World (via Boing Boing) (hat tip: Bnter).
Follow us on Twitter.
Sign up for Mediaite’s daily newsletter.
The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur filling in for Ed Schultz talked to former Labor Secretary under President Clinton Robert Reich about the recent request by U.S. companies for a tax holiday on the over $1 trillion in assets they have sitting offshore.
Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Multinational Cash:
At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.
The money -- including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. companies attribute to overseas subsidiaries to avoid taxes -- is supposed to be taxed at up to 35 percent when it’s brought home, or “repatriated.” Executives including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.
What nobody’s saying publicly is that U.S. multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid that tax. Over the years, they’ve brought cash home, tax-free, employing strategies with nicknames worthy of 1970s conspiracy thrillers -- including “the Killer B” and “the Deadly D.”
Read on...
Uygur asked Reich what solutions there are when we have one party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business as the Republicans are and too many Democrats willing to feed off of the same trough. Reich pointed to the obvious, which is campaign finance reform.
Transcript below the fold.
Cenk Uygur and Robert Reich on Corporate Tax Avoidance and the Need for Campaign Finance Reform
UYGUR: But we start tonight with the request by corporate America for a tax break for over $1 trillion they have sitting off shore. In a meeting with president, they asked for a tax holiday so that they can bring the money back into the country without paying their full share of taxes.
I love the terms they use. Wouldn’t you like to take a holiday from your taxes?
When big business does it, it’s not tax evasion, its tax avoidance. I’m sure we’d all like to avoid our taxes, but we don’t have the lobbying power of multinational corporations behind us. And we don’t have a whole political party devoted to making us richer. In case you’ve been living in a cave in the last 30 years, that would be the Republican Party.
Companies are playing a shell game, aided and abetted by the GOP, where they take money in and out country, depending on our tax laws, to make it appear as if they really didn’t make any money here. One common trick is to say that they made all their money in Bermuda, where they have to pay almost no taxes, but that all of their costs were here. Very convenient, of course.
So, in the end, we have a situation where ExxonMobil made $70 -- I’m sorry, $37.3 billion in profits in 2009 and paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes. Bank of America made $4.4 billion in profits, and not only did they pay nothing in taxes, the U.S. government owes them $1.9 billion.
I don’t know how they do that.
And GE, the parent company of MSNBC, in full disclosure, made pretax profits of $10.3 billion and somehow has a tax credit of $1.1 billion.
So I paid more taxes last year than the company that owns all of this? Now, does that mean the companies are unpatriotic and immoral? No.
You see, the most important thing to understand is that companies don’t have nationalities and they don’t have morals. They’re not immoral actors, they’re amoral machines. They’re profit-making robots.
They’re not allowed to have a soul or have feelings. If an executive paid the company’s full taxes out of his patriotic duty, he’d be removed from his post. That’s not how it works.
And remember, Google’s whole mantra is, "Don’t be evil." And they avoided $3.1 billion in taxes in the last three years by doing these same kinds of tax tricks.
Why? Because they’re legally bound to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
When we had a ban on companies doing business with Iran, Halliburton set up an office in Tehran, Iran. They did it anyway. Their CEO at the time was this man. You might remember him. He’s Dick Cheney.
Later, Halliburton would move its official headquarters to Dubai to avoid U.S. taxes, while continuing to rake in huge contracts from the American government as a so-called American company.
So what’s the answer?
First, we have to recognize the problem. Politicians who talk about being "pro-business" are usually using it as an excuse to give corporations tax breaks. By the way, some of which gets funneled back to him in the form of campaign donations.
So let’s get this straight. No one’s anti-business. We want our big and small companies to do well so they hire more people. But at the same time, we don’t want people using the excuse of being pro-business to funnel our tax dollars to multinational corporations.
Most of those guys that are doing the hiring, these so-called American companies, are doing it abroad anyway. Look, the Economic Policy Institute says that American companies created less than a million jobs here in the U.S., but created 1.4 million jobs overseas last year. So you can see where their priorities are.
If we give a tax break to a company, it must be to specifically create jobs here, period. If they don’t, they can go get their tax break from Bermuda or Singapore.
No more American taxpayer money to finance multinational corporations. There has to be a separation of business and state.
This is not the United States of corporate America. Our representatives in this democracy are supposed to look out for us, their voters, not their corporate benefactors.
Secondly, we have to get much tougher on enforcing our tax laws.
In 2004, the Bush administration allowed, again, so-called American companies to repatriate $312 billion back into the U.S. at the comically low rate of 5.25 percent. The real corporate tax rate is supposed to be 35 percent.
Now do you see why the corporate world loved Bush? That means all of the executives at those companies got much fatter bonuses that year.
We did the Republican strategy of just trusting big business to create jobs with all of those tax breaks that we gave them, and guess what happened? Since that huge 2004 tax break, we have lost nearly seven million jobs.
Would you trust your personal money with an amoral machine? No way, right? Then why do we all trust our collective money with these guys? It’s time we built a wall between business and state so that our government looks out for our interests and not multinational corporations` interests.
Now, get your cell phones out. I want to know what you think.
Tonight’s text survey is: Do you think tax breaks for corporations lead to more U.S. jobs? Text "A" for yes, text "B" for no to 622639. I’ll bring you the results later in the show.
Now joining me is former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. He’s a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and he’s also the author of "Aftershock."
All right, Secretary Reich, I want to play you a clip by President Obama, because there was a bill introduced earlier in the year to actually stop the subsidies for off-shoring jobs, and it didn’t pass. The Republicans killed it.
And here’s what the president had to say about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Republicans in Washington claimed to draw their ideas from a Web site called America Speaking Out. It turns out that one the ideas that’s drawn the most interest on their Web site is ending tax breaks for companies that ship overseas.
The funny thing is, when we recently closed one of the most egregious loopholes for companies creating jobs overseas, Republicans in Congress were almost unanimously opposed. The Republican Leader, John Boehner, attacked us for it and stood up for outsourcing instead of American workers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UYGUR: Secretary, is that right? I mean, that seems so unbelievably egregious.
ROBERT REICH, FMR. LABOR SECRETARY: Well, Cenk, when you said a moment ago that this is the United States of corporate America, or at least that’s what it seems, that’s egregious enough.
I mean, big corporations are arguing in terms of getting more tax breaks or getting a tax holiday that they need it in order to have an incentive to create jobs in the United States. But most big corporations now have plenty of money.
Corporate profits are higher than they’ve been in years. In fact, big corporations are now sitting on almost a trillion dollars worth of cash. They’re not creating jobs in the United States, they’re creating jobs abroad.
UYGUR: So the fact that they kill a bill that would have stopped, you know, the loophole that allows them to get a subsidy for off-shoring, I mean, I feel like that’s such a no-brainer for the Democrats, I almost want to pull a Jon Stewart and just do this whole show and the next show and the next show after that about that.
How did the Democrats blow that? Why don’t they take advantage of that and tell the American people what’s happening?
REICH: Well, there are a lot of no-brainers for the Democrats when it comes to corporate malfeasance or nonfeasance.
Cenk, one of the problems -- and I don’t want to tar all Democrats with this, but at least some Democrats with regard to campaign donations are drinking at the same trough as Republicans. They’re going to big corporations.
Now, earlier this year, the Supreme Court, you’ll remember, said in one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, in Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission, that corporations are people and they’re entitled to provide as much money to campaigns and to politicians as they want. Otherwise, their First Amendment rights would be breached.
Well, you can’t have it both ways. You said it earlier, and I agree with you, that corporations are not people. They’re just machines. They are just designed to maximize profits.
If we actually treat them as people and say they have First Amendment rights to undermine and corrupt our politicians and our political process, then we’re really in trouble, because they don’t really represent America and Americans.
UYGUR: Well, they keep calling them American companies, or even corporate America. But do these so-called American companies have any obligation to America?
REICH: Well, unfortunately, they don’t. I mean, these global corporations have a primary obligation under the law, and also in terms of economics to their shareholders, to maximize shareholder returns.
That’s what under American capitalism corporations are supposed to do. They’re not obligated to maximize jobs. And it turns out these days, the most rapidly growing markets are in China, India, Brazil, several other rapidly growing markets, and so American corporations are over there not only selling but also creating jobs. Not here.
UYGUR: You know, the thing is, I don’t want people to get me wrong. I actually don’t think that’s crazy or bad. I get why businesses want to start factories in China and why they’re using India for labor, et cetera. I understand that. But what drives me crazy is the idea that we should be subsidizing that.
REICH: Exactly. Cenk, I couldn’t agree with you more.
In other words, corporations should be, according to the way we organize capitalism, maximizing shareholder returns, maximizing profits. So they should be going all over the world. But there is no reason for us, taxpayers, to be subsidizing those corporations, and then those corporations taking those subsidies, or those tax breaks, and using them for creating jobs all over the world. It makes no sense at all.
UYGUR: Unfortunately, I’m going to have to ask you the question that we always run into here. What can we do about it? Because the seems like the politicians, honestly, a lot in both parties -- certainly the Republicans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational corporations, but the Democrats are partly owned, as you explained.
How do we get beyond it when they have already bought the politicians?
REICH: Well, what we have to, I think all of us, get serious about campaign finance reform. I mean, eyes glaze over. It’s not an exciting topic. We’d much rather talk about holding on to health care and everything else. But unless we actually stem the flow of corporate money into American politics, everything we want to do, everything we believe in is jeopardized.
UYGUR: Secretary Reich, thank you so much for joining us.
REICH: Thanks, Cenk. Happy New Year.
UYGUR: Happy New Year to you, too.
robert shumake
robert shumake
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Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
robert shumake
<b>News</b> Corp. Online Gaming Head Sean Ryan to Head Facebook's Social <b>...</b>
Sean Ryan, who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources. Currently, Facebook does not create social games, ...
500 More Red-Wing Blackbirds Found Dead in - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
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Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
robert shumake detroit
The WSO Forum (Warrior SPECIAL OFFERS Forum) is designed to allow warriors to offer other warriors (ONLY) quality products and/or services at a special discounted price. The offer cannot be given anywhere esle at the same price. If the product and/or service is to be offered elsewhere, it must be at a higher price, that is the rule. It also must be an original work/product/service of your own and can NOT be a PLR product, even if you change it.
It can however, be a product that someone creates for you and ONLY you. No one else can have the product to sell or the PLR or resale rights but you. This would be just like outsourcing somebody to make a product for you and only you. Then you may sell it as a WSO.
For example, if you have a web designer build you a template that has an easy to use admin area where anybody could enter their Google AdSense ID and other affiliate ID's and have their own money making site in whatever niche they want...you can make sure that you have the exclusive rights to it, and then sell it as a WSO at a great WARRIOR ONLY SPECIAL PRICE. This is just one example of many that I will cover in this report.
The WSO forum is an extremely generous gift of Allen Says, the owner of the Warrior Forum; it is a perfect example of the spirit of the forum and the generosity and kindness of true warriors. People truly have launched $30,000 a month businesses from the WSO forum alone and continue to do so today.
I personally have earned over $15,000 from the WSO forum alone in the five months that I have been running them. I average a $3,000-$4,000 a month business JUST FROM WSO's and it continues to grow. For that I am extremely thankful and since I am a teacher at heart, I want to share as much wisdom with you as I can.
Again, the WSO forum is truly a gift and should not be taken for granted
Where to Start
If you don't have a particular product or service to offer, let's think of what you can do. But first, let's actually go over what products and services are the most popular on the WSO forum.
Services:
- Article and/or Ghostwriting Services
- Copywriting Services
- Web Design
- Graphic Design
- Ad Campaign Services
- SEO
- Software Development
- Programming
- Wordpress Blog Building
- Social Marketing
- Coaching/Mentoring
- More...
Products:
- E-Books or Reports with PLR and RR/MRR
- E-Books that will be helpful to marketers
- Software that helps solve IM problems
- Software with PLR or MRR or RR
- Templates
- Marketing Techniques
- Pre-Built Businesses/Webites
- Business Plans or Business Models
- E-Courses
- Newsletters
- Membership Subscriptions
- New Marketing Methods
- More...
If you DON'T have any of these skills or products...
Think like a Millionaire!
...You can easily hire people to do some (or all) of it for you. If you want to run an article writing WSO but you can't write well, gather up a team of people or just one person who you can pay to write articles for you. Negotiate a percentage split, something like 50/50 or 60/40 (you get 40% because they are writing). Of course, your reputation is on the line so you must make sure they write quality articles and can handle the orders.
Then, you can run your WSO; the money will come in, you will pay your writer(s) and then deliver the finished work to the client.
If you charge $5 per article and sell them in let's say packs of 5 for $25, you will make $12.50 for every order that comes in and all you had to do was find a writer and pay $20 for posting the WSO.
This same technique can be applied to ALL the above mentioned services and products. There is Elance.com and Rentacoder.com where you can also find talented people who do great work for very low prices.
You can get help writing an entire e-book or report from someone who is good at writing. You can hire a graphic designer to design a bunch of really cool looking 'buy now' buttons and sell it as a graphics package on the WO forum. The list goes on and on but you must always think like a millionaire. What can you do to make money next? You KNOW what works, you see the popular WSO's....why aren't you grabbing a piece of the action?!
This is how multi-million dollar businesses are run. They outsource most of the work to people who are BETTER than they are at it. That is the 'Millionaire' mindset that you have to maintain. People are going to be better than you at web design, at writing, etc. so why not hire them instead of compete with them? That is precisely how Bill Gates built his empire.
If you DO have any of the above skills or products...
...Well now it's time to gather a few reviews and testimonials from fellow warriors. Offer your services and/or products free or cheap to members in exchange for an honest review or testimonial. Get some feedback and reviews and maybe make some tweaks/adjustments to your product based on the feedback.
Writing Your WSO Sales Copy
When attacking this beast, you must remember that warriors are sometimes skeptical of products/services, especially if they are "over hyped" up. If you write your own sales copy, try not to be so full of yourself and your offer. Using superlatives like "Amazing, Super, Marvelous, Fantastic, Unbelievable, Etc." will probably not work that well on the WSO forum, maybe somewhere else it would.
WSO Forum Etiquette
Use these as an example for how people like to be talked to and treated. Customer service is so important; if you fail in that department I don't know if you'll make it very far.
It is not polite to run a WSO and then 'disappear' and go to a movie with your girlfriend or boyfriend! This is perhaps the biggest pet peeve of WSO frequenters. They think to themselves (rightfully so...), "Why on earth would so-and-so run a WSO and then not be around to answer my questions?" or to send them their download link? Sometimes people have questions and they'll post them on the WSO itself.
If you are not around to answer that question, people will actually wait to buy your product until you answer. Either because they have the same question themself or because they want to see if you are reputable and reliable. If you take two days to answer someone's question, you will most definitely lose business.
Don't get angry with your customers either or have an attitude. This will hurt your WSO. The CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!
I have abided by that law no matter how hard I've had to bite my toungue in the past and it has brought me nothing but great success.
Sell Them The First Time Around
You want to get people interested enough to buy your WSO after seeing it the FIRST time! Otherwise, they may never get around to finding it again...
5 Tips on how to do this:
1. OVER-DELIVER and don't be afraid to let people know that you are over-delivering! Give a bonus away for free or better yet, lower your price even a little bit more and tell everyone you did so. This will make it easier for the buyer to make the decision to purchase your WSO.
2. Make sure that your WSO Headline and offer are congruent with each other. If your headline sounds really awesome, but your product or sales pitch doesn't live up...you will see a lot of views, but poor conversions. The more honest you are in your headline and copy, the more REAL customers you will obtain and the less refund requests you will have.
3. Offer refunds and guarantees! This will boost your sales and conversions considerably. Tell them if they are unsatisfied for any reason, they can have a full refund, no questions asked. You can even put a 30 day time limit on refund requests if you desire. There are some people who will ask for refunds but the amount of sales you will get from offering the guarantee, will outweigh the refunds for sure! Trust me.
4. Be straight and to the point. Nobody wants to hear your life story! Make a nice red headline, bold and centered at the top. Write a short but sweet sales copy including everything we've discussed and more and then an easy to access payment link.
5. I recommend using a payment link that goes right to a payment processor where they can type in their credit card info or use PayPal right then and there. If you take them to another sales page, you will lose a lot of potential purchases, that's just the way it is. As you saw when you purchases THIS report, I had a PayPal button on a simple HTML page and nothing else. Simple, easy and NO other option but to pay.
Most Profitable Niches and WSO's
In my opinion, the best type of WSO to run right now is one that offers a specific service such as article marketing and/or press release writing. Also, social marketing and blog posts fall into this same category.
Next would be a product of your own. I am good at teaching music so I wrote several books that teach people how to play guitar and other instruments. I sold these as a WSO to other marketers (instead of people who want to learn guitar) so that they can turn around and sell them to people who want to learn guitar. I sold the PLR and RR to them. (Private label rights and Resale Rights).
They can change it, leave it the same, put their name on it, resell it, give it away to build their list, etc, etc.
Try to write a report or e-book about something that you are knowledgable about, or again, OUTSOURCE the writing. It can be done very inexpensively and the money you can make from the WSO will far surpass the investment of getting some help.
These niches are the most popular right now:
- Weight Loss
- Fitness
- Make Money Online
- Domain Flipping
- Dog Training
- Water4Gas
- DNA Personalized Nutrition
- GPS
- iPhones
- Blogging
- Video
- Online Gambling
- Design
- Web Traffic
- SEO
- Marketing Techniques
- Article Marketing (Bum Marketing)
- PLR and MRR
If you can come up with a quality report, e-book or service that revolves around one of the above mentioned niches, you will have no problem making a lot of money on the WSO forum.
If you write ten articles on something you know about (or do a few hours of research about), lets say you write 10 water4gas review articles. You can charge $5 for the PLR to all 10 water4gas articles. That comes out to only .50 cents per article, which you would mention in your sales copy of course. If you sell 50 of them, you just made yourself $250. You invested $20 in the WSO and it took you maybe 10 hours or less worth of work. Even at 10 hours worth of work that comes out to $25 an hour, not bad if you ask me! With hundreds of warriors being on the forum at ALL times, selling 50 of those '10-packs' wouldn't be hard at all.
Build Relationships
When you run a WSO, your buyers may very well end up being buyers for life. Follow up with them after you make the sale and see if they would be interested in hearing about future offers of yours. Since they bought from you, you are legally allowed to send them emails unsolicited for up to two years I believe. Next WSO you run, send out an email to all of your previous buyers...you may just get surge of purchases before your WSO even gets attention from forum surfers.
I have built life-long business relationships on the warrior forum and most all of them were because of the WSO forum in one way or another.
Extras:
HTML Trick for WSO Forum
A neat trick is to use HTML code in the title/headine of your WSO ad. If you type ★ YOURTITLEHERE, after posting it, you will see a star, followed by the title. These ASCII codes are used all the time on the WSO forum and it helps attract attention to your WSO even when it's down further on the page. You can make hundreds of different symbols by typing the &# symbols followed by four or five digit numbers. As I said before, ★ makes a star. ♫ makes a cool looking music note. You can Google HTML symbols and find lists of all different cool ones. This gives your WSO a better chance at being seen, AND it impresses the reader because you know how to put 'code' onto your title.
The Low Price Idea Theory
I have ran many WSO's and the ones that earned me the most money and had the least amount of refunds, were the one's priced the lowest. I have made more money off of one WSO that I sell for $4 than I have from another one that sold for $12! People love good prices and that is what the WF and WSO forum are all about! Sharing your knowledge and being generous. Why not over-deliver?
I am working on a WSO that is going to be packed full of value, but only will cost $1 or $2 dollars. I figure...so many people will order it and NO ONE will ask for a refund.
***ADDING A PAYMENT LINK TO YOUR WSO!***
This part is easy, but a lot of people requested this information...so here it is!
To add a "Click Here to Buy My WSO Now" link to your WSO, that takes your customer to your PayPal payment page where they can pay you with their PayPal account or a credit card, you must first log in to your PayPal account.
Then, you will click on the tab that says "Merchant Services."
Once you've clicked on the 'Merchant Services' tab, you will see an icon that says "Buy Now Button" and you want to click on that.
Inside the "Buy Now Button" you can enter the name of your product (or service) as well as the price you wish to charge. If it's a $7 report, or a $2,000 service it doesn't matter, you can type it in the box that says 'price'.
Then, all you have to do is click "Create Button!" and that's it! You will be directed to a page that gives you the HTML code for your custom payment button. There will be TWO TABS on this section...one that says "Website" and one that says "Email."
To add a nice looking, shiny yellow "Buy Now" button to your website, you'll want to copy and paste the HTML code from the "Website" Tab.
However, if you want to add a TEXT PAYMENT LINK to your WSO, you will simply click on the "Email" tab. This will give you a shorter line of code, which is just a URL, that you can copy and paste into your WSO sales copy. When someone clicks on the link, it will take them to the PayPal payment page, just as it did when you bought this very report from me.
You can get even more advanced and have the customer sent to a specific URL after they have made a SUCCESSFUL payment. This means that you can offer INSTANT DOWNLOADS for your eProducts that you sell on the WSO Forum!!! This gives you a tremendous advantage over others, because many people want to have instant delivery of their product and you can get many more buyers by offering this.
To do it, you must click on "Advanced Options" before you click the "Create Button" link. This would be after you type in the product/service name and the price.
In the advanced options section, you can enter a URL (Web address) that every customer will be taken to after successful payment has been made. You can also enter a URL for when their payment is denied if you wish.
On the page that you send them to after successful payment...you would have your product on that page with a download link to the product. You would have to design this page yourself, or you could use a template.
That's how you add a text PayPal payment link to your WSO!...pretty easy right?
Conclusion
I hope you have been inspired to get going with your WSO. Taking action, as everyone always says, is really the best thing you can do. Hey, If you don't make a lot of money from your first WSO, you will certainly know what to do better or differently the next time, right?
The WSO foum is a place to get hundreds of targeted visitors to your ad daily and if you follow the above advice and perspectives, I can't see you failing. You must find a demand for something, and then fill it. If every warrior is talking about video marketing and video this and that....you might want to consider a WSO that is related to video. Heck, you could even make a video about how to make a video! That would be a great seller on the WSO board.
Beat Everyone Else's Price
If you beat everyone else's price, you will come out a winner. If the going rate for articles or a video about 'how to make a video' is $XX amount of money, charge a little bit less. If 5 articles normally costs people $25-35, do it for $20 and you'll get the business!
If there's a newbie e-book that sells for $12, sell yours for $9 or $10...get it? This method has worked wonders for me!
I wish you all the best of luck and success with your WSO endeavors!
robert shumake
<b>News</b> Corp. Online Gaming Head Sean Ryan to Head Facebook's Social <b>...</b>
Sean Ryan, who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources. Currently, Facebook does not create social games, ...
500 More Red-Wing Blackbirds Found Dead in - AOL <b>News</b>
Days after 100000 fish and approximately 4000 red-winged blackbirds were found dead in Arkansas, 500 deceased blackbirds and starlings were discovered on a Louisiana highway.
John Roberts Leaves CNN for Fox <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com
Executives at CNN confirmed Monday that John Roberts, who served as the morning anchor for the network since April 2007, would be joining Fox News as a national correspondent.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake detroit
Last night just before 12 a.m., Twitter began exploding with the news: Facebook had raised $500 million — from Goldman Sachs. Bolstered by a $50-million stake from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, a previous FB investor, the Wall Street behemoth had slapped down $450 million to snag the Internet behemoth — now valued at a cool $50 billion. As if on cue, the internet noted that yes, that was cooler than a million dollars.
Notes the NYT’s Dealbook, which broke the scoop: this makes Facebook “worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.” It also doubles Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-billion-dollar worth. It also makes Goldman Sachs the gatekeeper to who now gets to invest in the super-hot Facebook, and to the inevitable Facebook IPO. According to Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn Rusli, Goldman is “planning to create a ’special purpose vehicle’ to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, which would allow for max investment while circumventing disclosure rules for companies with 500 or more investors. Clever, that.
So: This is a big deal. Everyone’s already saying that this is putting Google even more on the ropes (seeing as now Facebook is the most visited website in the land) and that Goldman couldn’t be sitting prettier. Here are a few other things it means:
(1) Facebook hiring spree! To paraphrase Antoine Dodson, hide your startups, hide your engineers — Facebook’s a-comin’. Snapping up Hot Potato and Drop.io? Poaching Foursquare’s Nathan Folkman? That’s nothing compared to what Facebook’s got coming. Rumor has it they’re about to close on purchasing the Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park from Oracle. That’s probably not just for the scenery. They want to stock up, preferably with talent – and, importantly, companies – that will help it integrate across every platform possible. (I’m guessing one of the new buzzy photo apps will be snapped up.) If you think people are complaining about a developer shortage now, just wait.
(2) China! Mark Zuckerberg recently returned from a trip to China. Innocent pleasure jaunt for the Mandarin-speaking Facebook founder or connection-making relationship-building fact-finding mission to the land of 450 million potential users? China is certainly not an easy place to do business — they just kicked out Skype — but in a globalized, connected world, it’s certainly tough to ignore. Approximately 33% of its massive population is online and as we all know from the rest of the world, that is growing. It’s an insane market to ignore and smart, Mandarin-speaking audacious visionary CEOs probably aren’t going to shy away from trying. Facebook China. It’s gonna happen.
(3) Goldman’s PR Whitewash The Vampire Squid just attached itself to the buzziest, growing-est, Oscar-nominated-est, Person Of The Year-iest tech company around. Who will remember their year of scandal and record bonuses and how everyone hated Goldman Sachs (sample Gawker headline: “Who do you hate more, BP or Goldman Sachs?“). Goldman’s not there for you to like them, people, they’re there to make money — lots of it. But they did have a bruising year and being attached to the shining future-makers at Facebook (never mind the gatekeeper to the Facebook IPO) will certainly help. This lets them offer something shiny to their clients, and bask in that reflected glow. (And guaranteed cashola.) That doesn’t fool the people who know — I like Howard Lindzon’s take:
For Goldman Sachs, this is a no lose situation. If it works, they get the IPO and make some money. That is their job. They got off so easy with the government that this is like Vegas money they probably thought would be the taxpayer’s at some point a year back…The only thing I DO know is that Goldman could give a rat’s ass about the social web and sharing. If they are the top in social web, it’s small potatoes. The war in bonds, currencies and commodities is where the real money is at. This is play money. I hate that Facebook is letting them in.
This is not a coup for Goldman Sachs, this is a shame for the social web.
Okay I lied. I love Howard Lindzon’s take. So, maybe Goldman’s got an uphill PR sell. But — they’ve also got Facebook. Watch the narrative change.
(4) Bigger Players, Bigger Bets When Lindzon points out that this is small potatoes for Goldman, he’s not kidding. But now the bigger fish are sniffing around and what started as mutterings about a bubble somewhere in the late fall now seems to be turning into a gold rush. (Doesn’t Google and their adorable $6 billion offer for Groupon seem so quaint right now? Never mind Twitter’s recent $3.7 billion valuation.) These are billion-dollar figures, and they are actually now starting to sound…eensy. As Ray Kurzweil points out, when technology advances it does so exponentially — so it makes sense that the explosion of tech startups would chicken-egg in conjunction with an explosion of investor dollars — not just the usual (and educated!) suspects, but people on the sidelines reading about Facebook in their Time magazines and deciding that maybe the Internet’s not a fad, after all. (Yes. These people do exist, and many of them have a LOT of money.) High valuations, big deals, young companies getting scooped up — it’s gonna be a dizzying year.
(5) Sympathy For The Google. It’s official: Facebook has gone from underdog challenger of the mighty Google to the top social-tech dog. So watch for everyone to start rooting for Google again. After a wave of backlash (see here and here), the pendulum will swing back around to rooting for the loveable search giant with the cuddly name. Google can take your pity – its market valuation is almost four times Facebook’s at $190 billion, and its current year revenue is about $22 billion to Facebook’s $2 billion. Back to Lindzon: “I think that Google has to buy Twitter and that will start to be a meme soon. It’s a chess game and nuclear war now in the social space.” That sound you hear is the sound of the tech press collectively wetting itself. Ew. But still — everyone likes to root for an exciting matchup. Expect to see some bold moves from Google, soon — if they’re smart. Big “if” (RIP Google Buzz). But isn’t that how underdogs like it?
(6) New Facebook Ad Models. All that said…Facebook has made a big point about how it hasn’t really focused on the silliness of “making money” yet, despite that $2 billion annual rev and nearly 1 trillion display ads per year. I believe them — can they really not do better than targeted ads for Jewish singles in your area? You bet they can: They also make a point about knowing every little bit of information about you for the ultimate in micro-targeting. The online ad industry is evolving and innovating right along with the rest of the web (see AdKeeper) and the key to dominating going forward will be data — using it wisely to convert your users into dollars for advertisers. This is where smart technology will take user data and figure out how to map it on top of shopping data, so that purchasing intent can best be harvested. The stigma about buying online has now pretty much disappeared. With more people using the web, and mobile devices, more often do run more of their lives, there are big bucks at stake. And I’m not even TALKING about how Facebook is looking to horn in on search.
(7) New Facebook Business Models. They have all these users. All this data. They’d be crazy just to stick with what they’ve got. Hell, now they’ve got fun money just to fling up into the air and see where it goes. They’re poaching the best and brightest who all gush on and on about how “exciting” and “creative” and “free” it is. Clearly these people are getting to work on some fun stuff. So far Facebook has shown itself as adept at replicating the innovations of its competitors (see: Foursquare –> Facebook Places). But with all the resources at their disposal and innovations happening across every industry on every platform, they’d be nuts not to at least test the waters. Hey, that car’s not gonna drive itself. Oh, wait.
(8) People Generally Freaking Out This has already started to happen. First Groupon (“What? But they AREN’T EVEN A TECH COMPANY!!!”) and now Super-Sized Facebook. Entrepreneurs and founders and people with fledgling ideas that are half-built that they’ve been slaving over at night are obsessing about all day are suddenly freaking out that they have to get to market NOW before the bubble pops and the money dries up. Chill out, dude. (And, ladies!) If you’re making something of value, it’ll take. Just focus on it, be smart, and don’t let Twitter and TechCrunch freak you out. (Here, take some advice from these people.) Just a moment of Zen amidst the craziness. All right, now – onward! It’s 2011 and YOU’D BETTER NOT SCREW THIS UP. Haa, just kidding. Mostly.
Well: It should be interesting. Happy New Year, everybody!
Related:
Goldman’s Facebook Coup [Felix Salmon - Reuters]
The Social Web Index … All-Time Highs in Pressure and Price and Shame on Facebook [Howard Lindzon]
Was Goldman wise to invest $500m in Facebook at a $50B valuation? [Quora]
Goldman Sachs Just Bought The Facebook IPO [Business Insider]
Follow Rachel Sklar on Twitter here.
Illustration of Mark Zuckerberg as Avatar-ized Time Person of the Year from Sandbox World (via Boing Boing) (hat tip: Bnter).
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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur filling in for Ed Schultz talked to former Labor Secretary under President Clinton Robert Reich about the recent request by U.S. companies for a tax holiday on the over $1 trillion in assets they have sitting offshore.
Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Multinational Cash:
At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.
The money -- including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. companies attribute to overseas subsidiaries to avoid taxes -- is supposed to be taxed at up to 35 percent when it’s brought home, or “repatriated.” Executives including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.
What nobody’s saying publicly is that U.S. multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid that tax. Over the years, they’ve brought cash home, tax-free, employing strategies with nicknames worthy of 1970s conspiracy thrillers -- including “the Killer B” and “the Deadly D.”
Read on...
Uygur asked Reich what solutions there are when we have one party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business as the Republicans are and too many Democrats willing to feed off of the same trough. Reich pointed to the obvious, which is campaign finance reform.
Transcript below the fold.
Cenk Uygur and Robert Reich on Corporate Tax Avoidance and the Need for Campaign Finance Reform
UYGUR: But we start tonight with the request by corporate America for a tax break for over $1 trillion they have sitting off shore. In a meeting with president, they asked for a tax holiday so that they can bring the money back into the country without paying their full share of taxes.
I love the terms they use. Wouldn’t you like to take a holiday from your taxes?
When big business does it, it’s not tax evasion, its tax avoidance. I’m sure we’d all like to avoid our taxes, but we don’t have the lobbying power of multinational corporations behind us. And we don’t have a whole political party devoted to making us richer. In case you’ve been living in a cave in the last 30 years, that would be the Republican Party.
Companies are playing a shell game, aided and abetted by the GOP, where they take money in and out country, depending on our tax laws, to make it appear as if they really didn’t make any money here. One common trick is to say that they made all their money in Bermuda, where they have to pay almost no taxes, but that all of their costs were here. Very convenient, of course.
So, in the end, we have a situation where ExxonMobil made $70 -- I’m sorry, $37.3 billion in profits in 2009 and paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes. Bank of America made $4.4 billion in profits, and not only did they pay nothing in taxes, the U.S. government owes them $1.9 billion.
I don’t know how they do that.
And GE, the parent company of MSNBC, in full disclosure, made pretax profits of $10.3 billion and somehow has a tax credit of $1.1 billion.
So I paid more taxes last year than the company that owns all of this? Now, does that mean the companies are unpatriotic and immoral? No.
You see, the most important thing to understand is that companies don’t have nationalities and they don’t have morals. They’re not immoral actors, they’re amoral machines. They’re profit-making robots.
They’re not allowed to have a soul or have feelings. If an executive paid the company’s full taxes out of his patriotic duty, he’d be removed from his post. That’s not how it works.
And remember, Google’s whole mantra is, "Don’t be evil." And they avoided $3.1 billion in taxes in the last three years by doing these same kinds of tax tricks.
Why? Because they’re legally bound to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
When we had a ban on companies doing business with Iran, Halliburton set up an office in Tehran, Iran. They did it anyway. Their CEO at the time was this man. You might remember him. He’s Dick Cheney.
Later, Halliburton would move its official headquarters to Dubai to avoid U.S. taxes, while continuing to rake in huge contracts from the American government as a so-called American company.
So what’s the answer?
First, we have to recognize the problem. Politicians who talk about being "pro-business" are usually using it as an excuse to give corporations tax breaks. By the way, some of which gets funneled back to him in the form of campaign donations.
So let’s get this straight. No one’s anti-business. We want our big and small companies to do well so they hire more people. But at the same time, we don’t want people using the excuse of being pro-business to funnel our tax dollars to multinational corporations.
Most of those guys that are doing the hiring, these so-called American companies, are doing it abroad anyway. Look, the Economic Policy Institute says that American companies created less than a million jobs here in the U.S., but created 1.4 million jobs overseas last year. So you can see where their priorities are.
If we give a tax break to a company, it must be to specifically create jobs here, period. If they don’t, they can go get their tax break from Bermuda or Singapore.
No more American taxpayer money to finance multinational corporations. There has to be a separation of business and state.
This is not the United States of corporate America. Our representatives in this democracy are supposed to look out for us, their voters, not their corporate benefactors.
Secondly, we have to get much tougher on enforcing our tax laws.
In 2004, the Bush administration allowed, again, so-called American companies to repatriate $312 billion back into the U.S. at the comically low rate of 5.25 percent. The real corporate tax rate is supposed to be 35 percent.
Now do you see why the corporate world loved Bush? That means all of the executives at those companies got much fatter bonuses that year.
We did the Republican strategy of just trusting big business to create jobs with all of those tax breaks that we gave them, and guess what happened? Since that huge 2004 tax break, we have lost nearly seven million jobs.
Would you trust your personal money with an amoral machine? No way, right? Then why do we all trust our collective money with these guys? It’s time we built a wall between business and state so that our government looks out for our interests and not multinational corporations` interests.
Now, get your cell phones out. I want to know what you think.
Tonight’s text survey is: Do you think tax breaks for corporations lead to more U.S. jobs? Text "A" for yes, text "B" for no to 622639. I’ll bring you the results later in the show.
Now joining me is former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. He’s a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and he’s also the author of "Aftershock."
All right, Secretary Reich, I want to play you a clip by President Obama, because there was a bill introduced earlier in the year to actually stop the subsidies for off-shoring jobs, and it didn’t pass. The Republicans killed it.
And here’s what the president had to say about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Republicans in Washington claimed to draw their ideas from a Web site called America Speaking Out. It turns out that one the ideas that’s drawn the most interest on their Web site is ending tax breaks for companies that ship overseas.
The funny thing is, when we recently closed one of the most egregious loopholes for companies creating jobs overseas, Republicans in Congress were almost unanimously opposed. The Republican Leader, John Boehner, attacked us for it and stood up for outsourcing instead of American workers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UYGUR: Secretary, is that right? I mean, that seems so unbelievably egregious.
ROBERT REICH, FMR. LABOR SECRETARY: Well, Cenk, when you said a moment ago that this is the United States of corporate America, or at least that’s what it seems, that’s egregious enough.
I mean, big corporations are arguing in terms of getting more tax breaks or getting a tax holiday that they need it in order to have an incentive to create jobs in the United States. But most big corporations now have plenty of money.
Corporate profits are higher than they’ve been in years. In fact, big corporations are now sitting on almost a trillion dollars worth of cash. They’re not creating jobs in the United States, they’re creating jobs abroad.
UYGUR: So the fact that they kill a bill that would have stopped, you know, the loophole that allows them to get a subsidy for off-shoring, I mean, I feel like that’s such a no-brainer for the Democrats, I almost want to pull a Jon Stewart and just do this whole show and the next show and the next show after that about that.
How did the Democrats blow that? Why don’t they take advantage of that and tell the American people what’s happening?
REICH: Well, there are a lot of no-brainers for the Democrats when it comes to corporate malfeasance or nonfeasance.
Cenk, one of the problems -- and I don’t want to tar all Democrats with this, but at least some Democrats with regard to campaign donations are drinking at the same trough as Republicans. They’re going to big corporations.
Now, earlier this year, the Supreme Court, you’ll remember, said in one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, in Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission, that corporations are people and they’re entitled to provide as much money to campaigns and to politicians as they want. Otherwise, their First Amendment rights would be breached.
Well, you can’t have it both ways. You said it earlier, and I agree with you, that corporations are not people. They’re just machines. They are just designed to maximize profits.
If we actually treat them as people and say they have First Amendment rights to undermine and corrupt our politicians and our political process, then we’re really in trouble, because they don’t really represent America and Americans.
UYGUR: Well, they keep calling them American companies, or even corporate America. But do these so-called American companies have any obligation to America?
REICH: Well, unfortunately, they don’t. I mean, these global corporations have a primary obligation under the law, and also in terms of economics to their shareholders, to maximize shareholder returns.
That’s what under American capitalism corporations are supposed to do. They’re not obligated to maximize jobs. And it turns out these days, the most rapidly growing markets are in China, India, Brazil, several other rapidly growing markets, and so American corporations are over there not only selling but also creating jobs. Not here.
UYGUR: You know, the thing is, I don’t want people to get me wrong. I actually don’t think that’s crazy or bad. I get why businesses want to start factories in China and why they’re using India for labor, et cetera. I understand that. But what drives me crazy is the idea that we should be subsidizing that.
REICH: Exactly. Cenk, I couldn’t agree with you more.
In other words, corporations should be, according to the way we organize capitalism, maximizing shareholder returns, maximizing profits. So they should be going all over the world. But there is no reason for us, taxpayers, to be subsidizing those corporations, and then those corporations taking those subsidies, or those tax breaks, and using them for creating jobs all over the world. It makes no sense at all.
UYGUR: Unfortunately, I’m going to have to ask you the question that we always run into here. What can we do about it? Because the seems like the politicians, honestly, a lot in both parties -- certainly the Republicans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational corporations, but the Democrats are partly owned, as you explained.
How do we get beyond it when they have already bought the politicians?
REICH: Well, what we have to, I think all of us, get serious about campaign finance reform. I mean, eyes glaze over. It’s not an exciting topic. We’d much rather talk about holding on to health care and everything else. But unless we actually stem the flow of corporate money into American politics, everything we want to do, everything we believe in is jeopardized.
UYGUR: Secretary Reich, thank you so much for joining us.
REICH: Thanks, Cenk. Happy New Year.
UYGUR: Happy New Year to you, too.
robert shumake detroit
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