MetaMuse

Valuations of Social Networks

There's been a lot of investment and acquisition activity in the social networking space, and it got me to thinking about the valuation on a per-unique-user basis. So I spent some time on the Web and an Excel spreadsheet and came up with the following:

• Bebo raised $15M in May 2006, on an undisclosed valuation (but in the "mid double digit millions"). Based on 1.096M uniques in March 2006 and a SWAG of $50M valuation, that comes down to $46 per unique visitor.
• Facebook raised $25M in April 2006 on a reported valuation of $525M. With 12.917M unique visitors in March, that's $41 per unique.
• Sconex announced they were being acquired in March 2006 for $8.7M (per Red Herring). With 372K uniques in March 2006, that's $23 per.
• News Corp announced the acquisition of Intermix (MySpace) in July 2005 for $580M, who at the time indicated 27M unique monthly users. So that's about $21 per user, but those weren't all MySpace users since Intermix had a number of other online properties.

So clearly the valuations have increased on a per user basis over the last year. There have been other financings too, of which I don't know the valuations. Tagged raised $7M on 1.6M uniques in February. TagWorld raised $7.5M on 2.2M uniques in March. If you figure they gave away 25% of the company in the financing (just guessing of course), that's $13-$17 per user.

For these rough calculations, I'm counting total unique visitors not reigstered users. And I'm using fragmented data from Red Herring and Jeff Clavier's regurgitation of Comscore Media Metrix data.

It's Going to be a Wild Ride

I found the recent Clickz article "Bright Future, No Sunglasses Required" to be a very interesting perspective on what the Internet by 2010 will have done to life as we know it. Some key takeaways:

• I don't necessarily agree with him that "Everyone will hate Google, except the consumer". Sure, it's killing traditional media and yes the rising price of keyword advertising is certainly challenging online retailers. But every big company faces the next cool thing just around the corner. No one has a lock on the search and contextual ad markets. I think the biggest challenges to Google are in social search, consumer generated content, and click fraud. It's really hard to keep up with the pace of new content on the Web.
• Marketers will have indeed lost control over their message. The online mob rules, whether they're right or not, so you have to establish an honest dialogue with them.
• "The fight for control of personal information is at the intersection of a raging battle between the quest for corporate profitability, the need for national security, and the inalienable right in a free society for personal privacy." As more personal information is shared and fragmented on the web, and as online access proliferates to mobile devices, so too will scams, personal information theft, spyware and viruses proliferate.
• For online retailers, software publishers and Web site communities, it all comes down to trust. Trust will be harder to earn and easier to lose. Trust is everything between a brand and it's customers.
• What's called social search today will become part of online life in 2010. Smart mobs (communities) will form spontaneously and inform the online experience at every level.

Dirt Jumps and Step Up at Goat Hill

Been working on some jumps at Goat Hill in Kirkland. Here is some crappy video of me hitting the really cool step-up jump:

And then me on a fairly simply 6-pack: