MySpace 15 Billion!!??

[DeluxeNames]

RBC ana-lyst Jordan Rohan's comments that MySpace could be worth $10-$20 billion in a few years. In terms of users, it is the 7th biggest site and has almost half the users that Yahoo does.

My Take: If myspace can do that with, as Nuvo says, such poor programming and seemingly not much to offer users in real value except made it easy for them to put cool looking graphics on their personal sites, why can't the rest of us do something like that? If they can make it we can too. Never give up on your dream Webmasters.

What's your take on this?

From the article:
"Could MySpace Be Worth $15 Billion? Easy
The most surprising thing about RBC ana-lyst Jordan Rohan's comment that MySpace could be worth $10-$20 billion in a few years is that he deemed this assessment "audacious"--and the press seemed to agree. Why is this audacious? In little more than two years, MySpace has come out of nowhere to become the 7th biggest site in the U.S. Per NetRatings, it now has 50 million monthly users--closing in on half of Yahoo!'s domestic user base--and it is still growing at a fantastic rate (a reported 250,000 sign-ups a day). MySpace recently signed a $900 million multi-year search deal with Google, showing that the revenue is starting to follow."
http://www.internetoutsider.com/2006...myspace_b.html

[danielneri]

Oh wow. Well yeah good luck getting somebody to buy that. I know Yahoo is desperate to buy myspace, but i don't think they're willing to pay 15 billion, now or any time soon

[daboss]

15 billion? i think investors are dumb... for companies like myspace, the value of the company is mostly intangible - e.g. goodwill and all... the only advantage they have is starting earlier... if someone like microsoft came along and decided to go head on against them, i think that value will drop significantly...

[Nuvo]

MySpace made it's money through doing things other services don't.
The problem here is that other services don't do those things because they are generally considered bad idea's to anyone who's got a knowledge of how the internet and dynamic sites work.
Basically, people liked the fact that they can change the look and feel quite a lot without needing to know about hosting and the scripts that they could use, and MySpace is mostly a free service unlike paid hosting with support for PHP or another server side language.

Most companies such as Google's own Blogger wouldn't dream of giving the user the ability to easily mutilate the display code for their site as it leads to many problems such as the possibility of users embeding scripts which could damage the site and the possibility of a user writing code which is malformed to the point of crashing browsers or eating tons of bandwidth.
The fact that now famous people have used MySpace doesn't mean much if you're not an impressionable 13 year old as most big artists such as the Kaiser Chiefs (yes, I am plugging a Leeds band here) have their own dedicated sites.
MySpace can claim that it helped get people known who have since gained some degree of fame, but that really doesn't make it anything special as those users could have just as easily signed up on Blogger or LiveJournal and done most of the same things.

I know I'm comparing blogging to social networking here, but basically, a social network is just a blogging service with some systems that allow users to interact with each other easily (such as adding another user to your friends list and \ or showing a link to their most recent posting on your site).

I actually prefer Blogger users as generally, more of them know how to type and many use the pre-designed templates, which are better than most of the god awful MySpace pages.

[EhKho]

I wonder if MySpace will be held accountable for any/all Intellectual Property violations within their member's blogs