Zynga CEO Mark "just copy what they do" Pincus dumped $200m worth of company shares recently, safely in time for its stock to tank. Yahoo:
In April, Zynga conducted a "secondary stock offering" in which insiders dumped 43 million shares of stock at $12 a share, raking in about $516 million. Yesterday, four months later, Zynga reported a horrible quarter, and the stock plunged to $3. In other words, Zynga insiders cashed out at exactly the right time.
Though its treadmill-like browser games are crummy enough, I always thought gamers' collective hatred for Zynga oftentimes sprang from a misunderstanding of the company's business. Many saw it as a creator of low-quality, highly addictive products that were supplanting the market for well-made traditional computer games.
But Zynga isn't the new Civilization, even if Brian Reynolds did take a job there. Zynga is the new Video Poker–also technically a computer game, but so completely alien in marketing and demographic terms that no-one who plays games would ever notice that there was a billion dollar market out there for that sort of thing.
So, gamers, feel free to stop worrying about Zynga! Unless you invested in it, in which case you now have my permission to die.
Zynga Insiders Who Cashed Out Before The Stock Crashed [Yahoo. Photo: Joi Ito]
