How much is Metafilter worth?

October 24, 2005 2:29 AM

Metafilter is worth $1,801,447.14. Data from Technorati and inspired by research from Tristan Louis.
posted by Ljubljana to MetaFilter-Related at 2:29 AM (44 comments total)

In case Matt gets any ideas, can I point out that Coutts (The Queen's bank) say that you now need at least £2.6million ($4.6million) to live a millionaire lifestyle. So it's not worth selling up just yet.
posted by biffa at 3:00 AM on October 24, 2005

He did just quit his day job.
posted by fixedgear at 3:40 AM on October 24, 2005

"Your blog, http://slashdot.org/, is worth $0.00"

"Your blog, http://boingboing.net/, is worth $9,386,606.58"

"Your blog, http://www.kottke.org/, is worth $2,864,475.96"

There! Perspective. Don't really know how they arrive at the slashdot figure. And... how much is $2,864,475.96, any way?
posted by nthdegx at 3:41 AM on October 24, 2005

Can someone divide that by the total number of users and let me know what my share is?
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:03 AM on October 24, 2005

Carpetbagger!
posted by bifter at 5:05 AM on October 24, 2005

Google.com is worth $99 million if you believe these guys. That's a little short of the $100 billion recent estimates put it at.
posted by furtive at 5:53 AM on October 24, 2005

Wow, Dan Gillmore is already up to $777,936.12. Looks like leaving the Merc was a good call.
posted by allen.spaulding at 5:56 AM on October 24, 2005

My call for boobies remains unanswered.
posted by mds35 at 6:41 AM on October 24, 2005

I swear I posted the above comment in another thread. What happened? I must've hit "newer" by mistake.
posted by mds35 at 6:42 AM on October 24, 2005

It's funnier in this thread.
posted by found missing at 6:45 AM on October 24, 2005

furtive: "Google.com is worth $99 million if you believe these guys. That's a little short of the $100 billion recent estimates put it at."

Er, Google is a blog?
posted by Plutor at 6:58 AM on October 24, 2005

mullacc writes "...how can you even begin to value something as nascent as a blog using metrics as you describe? If you're concerned with the intrinsic value of this type of business, a metric like value/subscribers or value/monthly links or whatever is basically useless. For a mature media/telecom business, multiples like these are merely a shorthand for intrinsic value - they imply certain growth and return expectations. But a blog is such a new business model that growth and return expectations should vary wildly - Gawker could be the next Yahoo! or it could be nothing. The Skype acquisition is a good example - eBay paid $2.7 billion for a company with $60mm in revenue. Does that mean that VoIP companies are worth 45x revenue? I doubt it.
"

Trying to divine the value of something like a blog is silly. It's all art and almost no science. At best, one could view it as a call option. But it's probably better described as R&D spending.
posted by mullacc at 7:35 AM on October 24, 2005

Plutor : Er, Google is a blog?

Well, Google's blog is worth $1,894,596.24.
posted by Godbert at 7:39 AM on October 24, 2005

Wake me when we get to Web 2.0 numbers like scrillion and hacktillion. Only numbers like these can accurately describe the value of my blog.
posted by boo_radley at 7:59 AM on October 24, 2005

Google's net worth is also massively inflated by google and drooling fanboy simps. If you ask anyone that works on wall street (and isn't trying to get your money from you), they'll tell you that the ridiculous market prices for google simply can't sustain themselves. That estimate is based on nothing but hype, and it will cause the investors of that company who don't dump quickly enough to lose a lot of money.
posted by shmegegge at 8:13 AM on October 24, 2005

Jim Cramer was on Colbert report totally getting off to Google. I don't watch him, is he credible at all?

That said I'm tempted to short Google. I really don't see what they can expand to short of going on Microsoft's established territory.
posted by geoff. at 8:25 AM on October 24, 2005

schmegegge: I don't know...Google is trading at about 41x 2006 earnings and 32x 2007 earnings while Yahoo trades at 47x and 41x, for 2006 and 2007 respectively. Google's P/E multiple is high compared to just about any other company, but the most relevant company to compare it with is Yahoo!. And, apparently, it trades at a discount to Yahoo!. And Google's 5-year earnings growth estimate is 32% while Yahoo!'s is 30% - pretty close. And, on top of all that, Google just beat the hell out of Q3 estimates.

Anyway, my point is this: is Google's price crashes it will be because the company failed to live up to Wall Street's earning expectations, but not because the stock is overvalued at the moment. Of course, Yahoo and Google could both see their P/E multiple fall while still hitting earnings but, if operating performance remains constant, that will be an industry-wide issue not a Google issue.
posted by mullacc at 8:28 AM on October 24, 2005

Eh, they say my blog is worth $1,693.62, which is just ridiculous. My blog is currently worth about seven dollars.
posted by nanojath at 8:41 AM on October 24, 2005

But Yahoo's only like $35 a share, surely that's a safer bet if you were buying stock? Buying $335 shares of GOOG feels like a housing bubble, they can't go up anymore can they?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:43 AM on October 24, 2005

Jim Cramer was on Colbert report totally getting off to Google. I don't watch him, is he credible at all?

Those who call themselves "serious investors" think he's a joke. I made a good chunk of paper money with a couple homebuilder stocks he recommended this past spring, but didn't manage to get out at the top. And then I lost it on SHLD. Mostly I watch him for entertainment and occasionally glean an interesting idea or two. He's more trade-oriented than I want to be.

He's sure been right about GOOG, though, and in the face of much skepticism he has maintained and even raised his targets. Unlike the dot-com high-flyers of the '90s, Google actually has 1) revenue and 2) staggeringly high growth. On a recent show he hinted that perhaps, given 2007 estimates, it should be trading closer to $500. (You can't compare share prices directly between companies. For one thing, GOOG has never had a split. The real "price" of a stock is the P/E multiple, which, as mullacc points out, is about the same as Yahoo's.)
posted by kindall at 8:51 AM on October 24, 2005

But Yahoo's only like $35 a share, surely that's a safer bet if you were buying stock? Buying $335 shares of GOOG feels like a housing bubble, they can't go up anymore can they?

But, because G gomes before Y in the alphabet, Google is most definitely the better buy.
posted by lazy-ville at 8:55 AM on October 24, 2005

But Yahoo's only like $35 a share, surely that's a safer bet if you were buying stock? Buying $335 shares of GOOG feels like a housing bubble, they can't go up anymore can they?

If you said that about Berkshire Hathaway in 1995, when it was trading at around $10,000 a share, you would have missed out on more than 300% return over the next ten years.

Don't think of share prices. Share prices are meaningless. A stock can be overvalued at $5 or undervalued at $500. Companies split their stocks as their price goes up to keep them "under" $100 -- so they look more "affordable" to individual investors -- but this is just a psychological trick.

Don't think of investing in so many shares of a company as if that gets you an equal-sized piece. Instead you invest $1000 or $10,000 or $100,000, and buy as many shares as that comes out to.
posted by kindall at 8:57 AM on October 24, 2005

Sorry -- BRK.A was trading at $20,000 in 1995, my error.
posted by kindall at 8:58 AM on October 24, 2005

...they can't go up anymore can they?

But I thought a Googol was 1 x 10¹⁰⁰. There's a long way to go.
posted by gsb at 9:03 AM on October 24, 2005

The share price isn't very relevant as kindall points out, but it does have some side effects. BRK hasn't split because Buffet doesn't want his shares traded as freely as, say, Wal-Mart or the day-trader's pick-of-the-week. He wants investor in his stock to see it as something more important than the run-of-the-mill stock purchase. At $335, Google doesn't have the same effect - it actually may make the price more volatile because the likely buyers are institutional investors and hedge funds (but not retail investors) which are more likely to trade in and out of the stock. Retail investors are more likely to buy and hold. But if Google gets up in the $1,000s, it will be trade more like BRK.
posted by mullacc at 9:13 AM on October 24, 2005

And Google's IPO price (I can't remember exactly, but I think the price-talk on the morning of pricing was $85 but it ended up getting to like $135) was EXTREMELY high. Most IPOs go out at $15 - $20 - which is achieved by taking the total value of the company and dividing it by enough shares to get to that price. Google has definitely aimed to maintain a "high" stock price.
posted by mullacc at 9:25 AM on October 24, 2005

The institutional thing is a good point -- Cramer suggests that at the end of last month, a lot of funds were loading up on GOOG so that when they reported for that quarter, it would look like they'd had a lot of it. (Because their clients know GOOG is hot and if they don't have a lot of it, their clients will wonder what's wrong with them and pull their money out.) After the quarter ended, according to Cramer, they'd sell it off. And if you look at the chart, there's a nice little spike right at the end of September followed by a substantial dip a couple days later.
posted by kindall at 9:33 AM on October 24, 2005

I bought Metafilter back in 2002, right before Matt put a hold on public trading. Three years later, back on the market, still $5 a share. The Russell 2000 is up, like, 60%. Who the hell is managing this place? WHERE ARE MY DIVIDENDS?
posted by eddydamascene at 9:59 AM on October 24, 2005

The value may be calculable several ways, but there's no way Matt or Kottke could hand their gig off to someone without jettisoning much of it.
posted by scarabic at 10:20 AM on October 24, 2005

This and a dollar will get you a ride on the bus.
posted by Slack-a-gogo at 10:39 AM on October 24, 2005

My blog is "worth" a little over $14,000. I'm willing to entertain offers.
posted by solid-one-love at 10:49 AM on October 24, 2005

My blog is worth $0.00.

Shit, you'd think all the internet test result html pasted in there would bump it up a few bucks.
posted by moift at 11:08 AM on October 24, 2005

According to this, my blog is worth $3,387.24.

Any takers?

*crickets*
posted by sveskemus at 11:59 AM on October 24, 2005

Ok, my web log is worth $22,000 which is about about right since I invested in the gold-plated comment templates.
::::fwap::::fwap:::fwap::::
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:27 PM on October 24, 2005

It's all art and almost no science. At best, one could view it as a call option.

Now, how exactly would one do that? Even if you break out the greeks, you still need the value of the underlying asset.
posted by Kwantsar at 12:51 PM on October 24, 2005

kindall-- I know at least two money managers who've run models to see if they can profit from window-dressing. Both have said that those who "see" the effect in stock prices are probably suffering from confirmation bias.
posted by Kwantsar at 12:54 PM on October 24, 2005

It's undoubtedly probably hard to profit from it, but it also undoubtedly happens. Probably it's not reflected in the stock price all that frequently. But it seems a reasonable explanation as any for GOOG's behavior at the end of September, and it did play out basically as Cramer predicted. (Note that he doesn't predict this all the time for every stock.)
posted by kindall at 1:11 PM on October 24, 2005

Wow, my blog is apparently worth over $700,000.00... anyone need a blog? Who's buyin'??
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:25 PM on October 24, 2005

Kwantsar: I didn't mean to imply that it would literally be valued as a call option. But more abstractly, when Yahoo! buys any given blog or other small website/product, lets it operate independently and feeds it a little bit of spending money, they have purchased a "call" on that business. That is, if the idea pans out and a real market develops, Yahoo! can invest more money and turn it into a real part of its business strategy; if the idea turns out to be a failure or a market doesn't fully develop, Yahoo! has only lost a miniscule amount of money. I guess you could do some sort of binomial option pricing model - but I really meant "call option" as a euphemism for "gambling."
posted by mullacc at 1:51 PM on October 24, 2005

I demand that every time some says 'stav' or some variation, they link it to my weblog. Thus will the value increase, and will I become rich as stinkin Croesus, and leave all you haters to suck it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:32 PM on October 24, 2005

Was just about to complain that you weren't posting on your weblog anymore, stav, but I see you're back and bristling. Excellent. My plan is coming together.
posted by Jimbob at 4:59 PM on October 24, 2005

MeFi isn't worth $1.8MM.

Of course, Weblogs Inc. wasn't "worth" $25MM. That's roughly 24 times run rate revenue, assuming the $3K per day from AdSense for the network was accurate. Let's assume Jason got $3K a day from his other advertising - a fair guess, since he said AdSense was "a primary source of revenue," implying (to me) that it was probably his top revenue generator. That means 12 times run rate revenue.

This is not investment advice, and my comments do not constitute an offer, nor a solicitation of an offer, nor shall any securities of the Company be offered or sold, in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. And blah blah blah.
posted by sachinag at 5:50 PM on October 24, 2005

Of course, Weblogs Inc. wasn't "worth" $25MM.
Um. It's worth what someone's willing to pay. They got it, did they not?
posted by Count Ziggurat at 8:51 PM on October 24, 2005

It was worth $25MM to AOL, but sachinag's point (and mine earlier in the thread) is that that valuation doesn't do much to inform us of MeFi's or any other blog's value. At least not in direct manner such as price/link or price/revenue.
posted by mullacc at 9:34 PM on October 24, 2005