Ask HN: If Hacker News were for sale, how much would it be worth? - alex-wallish
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grizzles
Whatever the highest bid is. The market is the only true valuation mechanism.

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PaulHoule
The highest bid is often someone who overestimates what something is is worth.

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greenyoda
How would you make money off HN? Ads? Subscriptions?

Would the people in the HN community stick around if HN started showing ads
and selling their data? They could easily move to a similar site, such as
lobste.rs.

Would people pay money to access HN? Much of the value of HN comes from the
users who spend time sifting through a lot of junk articles and comments to
upvote the tiny fraction of interesting ones. Are you going to ask users who
create the site's content to pay for it?

If you can't monetize the site without driving its users away, then it's worth
$0.

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PaulHoule
I think it makes value for Y Combinator in terms of deal flow, and Startup
School companies to have increased access to talent, advice, etc.

There is some way to put a number on that, but few organizations could get the
value Y Co does.

For a start Wikipedia says the top Y Co companies are worth $155 billion, Y Co
gets 7%, so Y Co has made $10B or so, if HN is responsible for 1% of that,
that is $100m.

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gus_massa
YC get's 7% before dilution, so the amount is smaller.

Another method is to use the $1MM/engineer rule. There are 2official mods and
1 official developer (I'm not sure if his work is not shared with another YC
projects), and there is an undisclosed amount of semi-mods, and there is some
support crew that is probably shared with YC. So I guess $5MM or $10MM.

Monetization is a problem. Reddit was never a monetization success.
StackOverflow had better luck with that.

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1970-01-01
Infinity billion dollars

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therealmarv
1 Dollar

