Money Rail: eMarketer Reduces 2012 Facebook Revenue Estimate by 15%

Facebook has gone from social media monster to social media punching bag (at least on the business side) all in the matter of a few short months. This whole public thing isn’t as easy as it looks is it, Mark?

Well, to possibly add insult to injury, eMarketer has released that it is revising its estimates for Facebook’s revenue in 2012 by 15%. In an article they state

In February, eMarketer predicted ad revenues at Facebook would reach $5 billion this year, but underperformance throughout the first half of 2012, along with questions about the effectiveness of some of the site’s ad products, have led to a downward revision of close to $1 billion.

While that sounds bad it’s simply following suit with everyone else who seems to have grossly overestimated Facebook at this point in their development. Just watching the stock fall to under half its IPO price (at this writing the stock is shedding over 4% more NASDAQ:FB) has been proof that over-exuberance may have once again gotten the better of investors in the Internet space.

It’s not like it’s all going to H-E- double hockey sticks in handbasket though. eMarketer still sees double digit growth for the social media giant. We just may have to temper the ‘Mark Zuckerberg is taking over the world’ talk for the foreseeable future. Here is their estimate for growth for the next few years. Double digits are nothing to sneeze at these days.