Don't Give Up on Social, New-Media Stocks

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- When I rolled into Manhattan on vacation earlier this month, the higher-ups at TheStreet roped me into filming a video on Wall Street with the great Debra Borchardt. I told them I would not wear a tie, shave or cut my hair. They still wanted to forge ahead with the experiment.

In Net Stocks Require Patience, I make my first appearance on camera since my talk radio days. With a few tweaks here and there, I think I could land a gig as Jim Cramer's fill-in host on CNBC.

In any event, while not being able to hide behind a keyboard, I had to attempt to defend my position that, over the long-term, at least, a handful of social and new-media stocks will not only survive, but prosper.

That said, do not take this article as a call to buy, say, Groupon (GRPN), or any other social or new-media stock for that matter.

I have no opinion on Groupon. It's not a company or stock that I follow closely. There are solid GRPN bear cases, but I'm not ready to just ride the coattails of somebody else's opinion. I'll do one of two things: remain on the sidelines and reserve judgment or do the work and form my own opinion.

But many investors have written off stocks like GRPN without performing their own due diligence. Hating this class of equities became fashionable after the Facebook (FB) IPO. That media-perpetuated hysteria spawned several incredibly faulty memes.

One is that if you went public in the last couple of years and do anything online, you're worthless. This often comes alongside this hollow two-pronged talking point: Will these companies ever find a viable business model (prong 1) to effectively monetize mobile (prong 2)?

There's so much wrong with that standard criticism.

It's simply absurd to expect companies like Facebook, Pandora (P) and Zynga (ZNGA) to become wildly successful -- from revenue and profitability standpoints -- on emerging mobile platforms overnight. If you think we should be seeing faster results, I think you're (A) underestimating the magnitude of the transition from desktop to mobile and (B) cherry picking perceived failure over reported success.

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