I think it's worth more, honestly. Probably $100-200B.
That sandbox is a lot bigger than the sandbox you & I like to inhabit. The set of folks interested in technical programming & startup-related news probably numbers under 100K. I was an admin for a Harry Potter fansite in college that had 100K registered users, close to 1M when guests were counted, and we were far from the largest Harry Potter fansite. The set of folks who like clickbait, celebrity gossip, hanging out with friends, and making funny faces is a couple orders of magnitude larger than that, probably past a billion.
People are very different in their refined passions but alike in their base desires. That means that anything that caters to base desires, by definition, will have a market size much, much bigger than sites that cater to refined passions.
Well considering they are the 9th most visited site in the US and the companies ahead of it are all making revenues in the Billions (except Wikipedia and Twitter), then, ridiculously enough, $100 million sounds pretty modest.
Multi-millionaire as the typical valuations of start-ups go. Getting 50K paying users would be absolutely amazing out of the gate. Many web properties with a fraction of that are worth in the millions.
It's not overvalued at all. They could probably pull in $50M-$100M a year in revenue right now with their traffic, extrapolating a bit from the revenues we're getting from our single application.
I'm pretty surprised by how many hackers here are completely missing this boat. IMHO it would be worth it to do a little more research before dismissing the entire space - this is going to play a larger and larger role in the future of the internet IMO.
My contention is that the average value per user of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp, and Youtube is $56.
You take the average of those and you're probably looking at a pretty decent ballpark for the value per user of a website that depends on user-generated content and that people use every single day.
At $145 per user, Quora is almost THREE TIMES that average. If that's not an over-hyped valuation then I don't know what is.
500 million users, 100,000 communities. Since I don't pay to use it, presumably the value proposition lies in the small cohort who do pay for ephemeral karma and style additions, value added services, and of course the advertising BI which fuels the internet at large.
Since I am not paying, and I am not bidding for shares, I must be the product. This is merely a statement of my value (1/500,000,000th) to them as a BI source.
on $6nm value: $1200 per user, $60,000 per community. Thats not annual, presuambly at a sane ROI its some sub-multiple of that as extracted/notional value, but I lack the fu to say what that is.
I have to say, I don't feel worth $1200 in reddit views. Gosh, I wonder if selling my read impressions is a breach of GDRP and/or CCPA
Next to Facebook at $50bn that seems almost reasonable...
Joking aside it does seem on the high side but in it's favour it is a top 100 site by traffic, it has something resembling a basic revenue model in place, they have a plan for growth which they seem to be executing on reasonably and they are in a space which is under going growth and which clearly has some potential.
Yes right now Stack Overflow eclipses the other sites but having one massively successful site to fall back on and that they've learned things from is actually a pretty major asset.
wow I am surprised this has gotten so many comments. Obviously it depends on the value of the company. If threw together a prototype that hadn't seen a single user and there was no apparent IP, then 100k would be a ton of money. If I were sitting on the next YouTube with millions of users added each month, then 1B+.
Revenue is about $6000 per month and the costs for running the site are probaly quite low, minus the costs for the owner himself, so maybe monthly profit is around $4000? So given the formula for non-internet companies which are valued around 2-3 times the annual profit, the company would be worth around $120000.
Additionally consider these facts: the site is quite popular and has gained some traction but is still primarily interesting for a specific niche (startup founders). I would say the price for acquisition is at least $500000 and may very well be around or above 1 million which is even more likely because the owner has agreed to continue work on the site and growing it even more.
That isn't the point they're making here, though. They're comparing the valuation with the size of the user base. For example, at $3b for LinkedIn, divided by the number of users they have, it comes to about $33.33 per user. In other words, a sort of very rough market valuation of what the industry thinks the users are worth, I suppose.
This seems like a really low number considering they have 500M "customers". I assume they're making a bit more than $2/person on the site (profit)...how can they possibly be worth $50 Billion?!
That sandbox is a lot bigger than the sandbox you & I like to inhabit. The set of folks interested in technical programming & startup-related news probably numbers under 100K. I was an admin for a Harry Potter fansite in college that had 100K registered users, close to 1M when guests were counted, and we were far from the largest Harry Potter fansite. The set of folks who like clickbait, celebrity gossip, hanging out with friends, and making funny faces is a couple orders of magnitude larger than that, probably past a billion.
People are very different in their refined passions but alike in their base desires. That means that anything that caters to base desires, by definition, will have a market size much, much bigger than sites that cater to refined passions.
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