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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

$10B valuation? This is unreal. On what is this valuation based other than "comps"?

How did valuation against comparables work to match reality for the real estate bubble?

Zynga has revenues in the hundreds of millions, based on "You pay us money and we pay you pixels." They have had explosive growth. Betting on that growth to continue, FB to not bleed them dry, and users to continue loving their product is a bet, but it isn't crazy like saying a pet food company which loses money on every shipment would make it up in volume and hit the same valuation.

Ok, lets get serious here. $10B valuation / $250M revenue/year = 40x multiplier.

Do people really think that Zynga is going to continue to deliver for years and years to come?

I would say no, but never underestimate the extent of human stupidity. All those bizarre Farmville-branded snacks and drinks at 7-11? Somebody's buying that crap.

More like 10B/1B. That's a 10x val.

A 40x multiplier for a company growing as fast as Zynga is is totally reasonable. They aren't a Fortune 500 blue chip whose growth is primarily constrained by the market and macroeconomic factors: there are still more people who have not experienced the joy of virtual cabbage farming out there.

I wouldn't sell my index funds and buy Zynga, but if Wall Street is investing in them, I think that probably isn't in the top half of dumbest things Wall Street will do this year.

I'm not sure there actually are that many people that haven't discovered the joys of virtual cabbage farming that might be persuaded to do so. They claim 320 million people have tried a game, which is a staggeringly large proportion of free internet users. The amount of worldwide free time spent on Zynga is so ridiculously huge I genuinely can't see the potential for upward trends to continue (other than cornering the Chinese social game market, which will be tough). Unlike Facebook, I don't think it's fair to say they're only scratching the surface of their revenue-generating potential either.

10X Revenue is roughly the market price for SAAS model companies. The general perspective is that Gross Margin is frequently in excess of 80%; in that world, you can spend marketing and sales dollars with abandon and still make money.

By the way, this is roughly how SalesForce is valued -- they turn a very small profit (100 or so P/E), and roughly an 8 to 10x P/R. I think of those prices as 'sold on the growth vision' but not egregious.

So Zynga have $1B revenue/yr by your metric? I somehow doubt they're that high... so hence the more unrealistic multiple based on other unreal valuations (ie, comps).

Venturebeat claims Zynga'a 2010 revenues were $850m (http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/17/zynga-funding-10-billion). Just shy if a billion but given growth quite conceivable that they did more than $250m in last quarter ($1B annualised)

Interesting to compare and contrast market cap versus EA and Activison.

I think it could be realistic. You have to think about the size of their user base and how much money they must be earning through each of the users. Their user pay rate must be fairly high too, I'm guessing 20-50% of their users pay at least some form of money, where most companies that that offer any freeium service usually is 10% or less.

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