HN Explorer

Poll: Are Slide and RockYou overvalued?

6 points by rms ↗ HN
To me, much more so than Facebook, Slide and RockYou seem like the most egregious example of the current web 2.0 irrational exuberance. But maybe I'm missing something. I remember seeing Max Levchin say they have much bigger plans. What can Slide and RockYou do to justify their combined billion dollar valuation?

13 comments

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s_baar
I don't see what they can do. Thanks for bringing this up, I'd really like to see what other people can make of this.
aston
One of their big selling points is reach. Slide's is on the order of Facebook's, and in theory could be bigger. If in fact the huge monetization thingy turns out to rely on sheer user numbers, half a billion will be way under what Slide is worth.
fairramone
Oh, they'll worry about that later. Right? Oh, wait -- it is later! :)
mhartl
Wow, CowboyNeal---that takes me back. Kids these days don't remember the joys of /. polls.
aston
Really? http://slashdot.org. Still kicking, still has a CowboyNeal joke in every poll, and with more readership than this site by a decent integer multiple.
mhartl
I'm not saying they're dead, just that the /. thunder has been stolen by Digg. Or maybe it's just because I stopped reading Slashdot. :-)
blader
They can reach more users than any individual social network on the internet.
flashinfremont
Yes. $4 per unique without a real business model. Smart folks and they each have their own version of how they are going to be big, branded ad networks but the fundamental issue is that brands need to control where their ads are placed. This is polar opposite to how RY and Slide distribute their content.
mixmax
Never heard of either of them.

Must be one of those valley hype things.

rms
They make widgets for facebook and other social networks.
STHayden
as far as I know they are all about getting ads in to all of those flash embeds. So largely I think this is a question of ad click through rates on the embeds. these days they seem to be poor but who knows if anyone will figure out how to fix that.
foulmouthboy
Reach is overrated. Others have alluded to it, but reaching potential customers is just scratching the surface. There needs to be the engagement and conversion to dollars.

Here's an analogy that I'm almost positive won't make sense: A panhandler sitting outside of a pizza place in downtown Manhattan will potentially "reach" the same number of people with their respective messages. Which one will have made more money at the end of the lunch hour?

hoffmabc
Never underestimate the power of teenagers who want to SuperHug or SuperPoke.