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Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

public.brightside.io

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Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#21

Post by Retric »

oskarth wrote: post #10

Wow. This graph is certainly illuminating: https://public.brightside.io/v1/chart/321ef2c603e8d67080afcd... 450000000 is a lot of users. Metcalfe's law says that the value of a communication network is proportional to the square of the connected users. Then add to this the amazing growth they are seeing. I don't think people quite realize what this means. EDIT: In general, it baffles me how many armchair opinionators…

Metcalfe's law is clearly wrong after a network get's overly large. I could in theory call a random person in China but if I have no way of communicating with them it's practically worthless to do so.

Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#22

Post by logicallee »

oskarth wrote: post #10

Wow. This graph is certainly illuminating: https://public.brightside.io/v1/chart/321ef2c603e8d67080afcd... 450000000 is a lot of users. Metcalfe's law says that the value of a communication network is proportional to the square of the connected users. Then add to this the amazing growth they are seeing. I don't think people quite realize what this means. EDIT: In general, it baffles me how many armchair opinionators…

isn't the obvious graph to ask for cost per user / revenue per user? (i.e. "acquisition price" per earnings per user.)

After all, that's the main way that we can consider a per-user cost to be "high".

Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#23

Post by nl »

Retric wrote: post #21
oskarth wrote: post #10

Wow. This graph is certainly illuminating: https://public.brightside.io/v1/chart/321ef2c603e8d67080afcd... 450000000 is a lot of users. Metcalfe's law says that the value of a communication network is proportional to the square of the connected users. Then add to this the amazing growth they are seeing. I don't think people quite realize what this means. EDIT: In general, it baffles me how many armchair opinionators…

Metcalfe's law is clearly wrong after a network get's overly large. I could in theory call a random person in China but if I have no way of communicating with them it's practically worthless to do so.

Cat gifs are pretty universal.

But seriously: I've had people on conference calls when they couldn't understand the language, but someone wanted them to see slides. The fact they could join the call (in that case on Skype) definitely made the network more valuable.

You might argue that the fact you can't speak to some of them drops the value per user, and that is true to some extent. But the fact they are on there and attract other people (some of whom you can speak to) adds value for you, too.

Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#26

Post by greendestiny »

SnowProblem wrote: post #4
ghayes wrote: post #3

Uh, is it just me or is this chart having a hard time with comma versus period for "thousands separator"? Broadcast.com is listed as having $10,961 cost per user, but comes up as $10.961 on the chart. [Sale price of 5.7B for 520K active users]

It's not just you. I was about to post this. On a related note, 11K per user is insane. What did Yahoo see in Broadcast.com?

What they saw was youtube.

Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#27

Post by nl »

Some of these acquisitions weren't done for the users.

Aardvark, Jaika, Dodgeball, Picasa, Broadcast.com, FriendFeed (missing), maybe Flickr as well as more recent acquisitions like DeepMind ($900M to Google, zero users) were bought for some combination of the team and the technology.

Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#28

Post by chavesn »

All this shows to me is how useless it is to compare by "cost per user". The note at the bottom says "Facebook acquired WhatsApp for 16 billion dollars, the largest startup acquisition to date. Cost per user was comparable to Google's YouTube acquisition.".

It's sort of close, but we're still talking about a swing of >30% there -- $5 billion dollars in WhatsApp's case.

There are many things missing from "cost per user" but I think the first thing to ask is "user doing what"?

Re: Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user

#30

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nl wrote: post #23
Retric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metcalfe's law is clearly wrong after a network get's overly large. I could in theory call a random person in China but if I have no way of communicating with them it's practically worthless to do so.

Cat gifs are pretty universal. But seriously: I've had people on conference calls when they couldn't understand the language, but someone wanted them to see slides. The fact they could join the call (in that case on Skype) definitely made the network more valuable. You might argue that the fact you can't speak to some of them drops the value per user, and that is true to some extent. But the fact they are on there an…

Cat gifs aren't a thing in china, I think its mostly an American fetish.
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