Lots of folks are talking about Metacafe's possible $200 million acquisition, possibly by Yahoo!. Peter Cashmore says $200 million is a steal. Fred Destin finds this press release, which says Metacafe has 16 million unique monthly visitors (UMV). He then looks up UMV valuations for other social networks.
The YouTube acquisition, for instance, was worth $23 per visitor. Google's $900 million ad deal with MySpace? $11.25. CNet: $16. So for Metacafe, $200 million would be $12.50 per visitor, which is not unreasonable. (Google's shares, BTW, are priced at $272 per UMV.)
Fred's stats made me wonder what GoDaddy's UMVs looked like. According to Alexaholic, GoDaddy has a significantly wider reach than Metacafe:
Unfortunately, it's generating less than half as many pageviews (or is only half as successful in holding website visitors attention).
Of course, GoDaddy isn't a social network - but might it benefit from becoming one? Demand Media, one of its competitors in the domain registration space, is in the business of audience monetization. But while Demand Media has raised $220 million in venture capital, based on a $500 million valuation, GoDaddy was said to be worth just $250 million in pre-IPO rumors earlier this year. This figure may have increased since then, but continues to be calculated based on the company's revenue. Which puts it at the mercy of churn.
Wouldn't GoDaddy be better off it it put some effort into making its very popular site more of a destination? It doesn't take advantage of its audience at all beyond trying to sell its visitors web hosting. Web hosting is useful at all, but it only accounts for 0.1%, perhaps, of the average small site owner's monthly spending. Shouldn't it try to get a piece of the other 99.9% of the action?
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