Ask HN: If it were to be sold, how much would HN cost?

3•01-_-•1mo ago

Comments

colesantiago•1mo ago

$0.02

01-_-•1mo ago

Haha, you failed.

bigyabai•1mo ago

I don't know if they're wrong. HN's primary utility is promoting YC's job openings and product announcements alongside the more important industry-wide news. Turn it into a generic link aggregator, and owning/moderating/updating the site might be more trouble than it's worth.

01-_-•1mo ago

You forgot to mention the great discussions that take place here and that revolve around topics that are very relevant to your readers.

viraptor•1mo ago

It is, but that doesn't bring value for the owners on its own. Something else has to exist on top, or you'd have to run the service and moderation on donations. The forum on its own has negative value.

baobun•1mo ago

Now you are talking about value but you asked about cost. They are not the same.

bigyabai is talking about utility from perspective of the owner or a hypothetical buyer, not concerned with the wider community.

colesantiago•1mo ago

You failed realise that bookface is of much much more value than HN.

HN is just a free link aggregator, you can't make money from it.

bookface is only accessible to YC founders, which means YC founders have given a chunk of their company away to access it (as a bonus)

You see, the network of bookface (and bookface its self as a part of YC) is more valuable than HN.

Bender•1mo ago

If it were to be sold, how much would HN cost?

I think it would have to include YC itself so in the billions, or if one counts the portfolio then theoretically hundreds of billions but only YC's financial people could really answer that and even then the market would have to decide. HN is just a link aggregator and link discussion site under YC.

Guestmodinfo•1mo ago

Atleast around 1B$, because it is a prime discussion place for tinkerers. It makes sense to be valued at around 2 cents worth compared to what twitter was

01-_-•1mo ago

exactly

bigyabai•1mo ago

While we're at it, I'd like to propose a valuation of $5 billion for Neogaf. Any objections?

01-_-•1mo ago

Whoa, hold on! That's a lot of money :D

They must already be earning something from the ads.

uberman•1mo ago

I have to disagree. In my opinion, there is no real way to monetize this in a way that the community would embrace. You might run ads or email campaigns for a year but I imagine most users would just go someplace newer or better. No way to monetize ultimately means no value.

Guestmodinfo•1mo ago

There's nothing to be gained from selling the services of HN to you and me i.e. the general public but a buyer who can buy HN for 1B$ could set some fine tuning in place that suits their interest without changing the site as much. Like someone fine tune HN as an engagement metric among the HN for various product designs. It's a media outlet, those controlling it can have better use suiting their purposes, they don't have to sell it like film tickets to make money out of it

uberman•1mo ago

Twitter has about 40k times the daily activity of HN. If we assume Twitter has a value of 40b that would make hn valued at 1m which I think is still way way over valued imho.

toomuchtodo•1mo ago

What is the value of Wikipedia? Hard to value public goods, because the value of HN comes from its mods. I suppose if one must, start at whatever gains YC has seen on its investments during HN's lifetime, with some discount for the fact that ZIRP is unlikely to occur again and the future will not be like the past wrt the startup ecosystem. There is no guarantee a new owner would cultivate the same forum participants who might consider being a founder or employee of a YC portfolio company. The product is YC portfolio company stock; HN is machine to leverage curious, driven people as fuel for VC gains, with the consumer excess being brain tickles for the rest of us.

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