I reckon I'd be happy with $850 for three years work... http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/14/bebo.web20 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/13/bebo.web20 http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/03/aol_bebo_the_kiss_of_death.html http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeff_jarvis/2008/03/a_smothering_embrace.html
check out Apps R Us if you're interested in buying apps on Bebo, Myspace, or Facebook. http://www.Apps-R-Us.com
It's stories like this that help keep me motivated - if you can make a site that reaches enough people then it's worth it's weight in gold just for the advertising revenue alone. Nice I've had 1 million visitors and 4.5 million page views over the last year so I believe I'm well on my way (Bebo gets this amount in a day!)
Stories like those make too many people spend too much time working on their web-sites without getting anything in return. Most people don't consider that behind sites such as MySpace, eBay, FaceBook was invested venture capital of around $1 million or more as their start up. Regarding Bebo: 'Balderton Capital is the only institutional investor in Bebo. It provided first-round financing of $15 million in May 2006 to assist Bebo to develop its business model.' 'Balderton Capital is one of Europe’s largest venture capital firms, committed to finding and helping talented entrepreneurs build great companies. Based in London, it manages approximately USD 1.5 billion in committed venture capital.' There are two sides of the Internet: major Internet companies, and the rest of the Internet. Usually major Internet companies mean a venture capital in their start-ups. Big advertisers put millions in advertising with major Internet companies that are world known brands, not in the rest of the Internet. One can summ up 20 web-sites with the same page view numbers per day as Bebo, and those sites in combine are not worth 1/100 for what Bebo was sold because they are the rest of the Internet. There are sites that have millions of page views a month and can hardly cover server costs. Big advertisers like Hollywood Film Studies, Nike, Telecoms... are interested in major Internet companies, that is Yahoo, FaceBook... There's a great gap between major Internet companies and the rest of the Internet.
For having $15 million startup capital, you sure as hell think they could make their website look better than it does!
That's peanuts compared to what MySpace was sold for. But I guess MySpace is more popular hence the larger price tag...
It is not all about the elite few who manage to attract large investment. If this were the case then the school kid from England who built a site in his spare time over 3 years and sold his website valued at £8m last year would not have been able to sell it. O.K. he did get 70,000 visitors per day with advertising revenue of some $5k but as we all know the key is real visitors/members to your website and of course also having a niche goes a long way. JB
I think your math is a little off, or I've been misinformed. But Myspace was sold for $580 million. So Bebo sold for more. Since $850m > $580m
Your right. My mistake, I meant Facebook, not MySpace. Microsoft bought 1.6% of Facebook last year for $240m.