HN Explorer

How much is News.YC worth?

10 points by blored ↗ HN
If someone wanted to sell a site with a similar user and traffic numbers, in your opinion, what would be the present worth in 2007 dollars, 2002 dollars, and possibly 1999 dollars for a site like news.ycombinator.com.

12 comments

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jdavid
if we are going to play this game, don't we need the stats on the site?
trekker7
Should it vary by site content? Reddit turned into a general purpose social news site, but Hacker News is more of a niche thing. Would a larger corporation buy a site like this? I'm not saying they wouldn't; I don't know how it works, maybe someone could explain.
flyhighplato
It would probably be worth more as a web application that allowed you to pretty much run your own reddit or news.ycombinator than as a "hacker news" site. A larger corporation might buy it for the actual software, not the audience.
SwellJoe
The software is trivial, or close to it. Sure, there are a few smart/hard bits, but any competent developer could resolve them with a month or less of development time.

Building a community is much harder than building a simple web application like this one. And not that by saying this, I'm not trivializing News.YC, I'm just saying you're placing value in the wrong place.

alex_c
Agreed, but you can only sell a community once, you can sell the software many times.
staunch
It's worth exactly $48,493.63 USD.
dood
However much anyone is willing to pay for it, like anything else.
henning
fun exercise: come up with 5 different ways of valuing news.yc, each of which seem reasonable and each of which give wildly different answers.
mlibbrecht
The value of news.yc is the input of pg and the other moderators. Without them, news.yc is just another reddit.