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Comment by PunchTornado | Hacker News Reader

Article says 160bn. I disagree. If google would sell youtube now, no company will have 160bn at their disposal to buy it + all the money needed to integrate it and keep it running. Imagine the HUGE COST associated to disconnect it from other google products.

If youtube would be sold at an auction tomorrow, few companies will come (facebook, amazon etc.) and it will receive way under 100bn.

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The more likely scenario would be spinning it out as a separate company in which case it would probably be the biggest google cloud customer for a long while.

No one needs to buy all of a thing for it to be valued at some price. If you buy half for 80B, is that not an argument for the whole thing being 160B? If you but 1/10000th for X, then the same argument works.

2019 Revenue > $15B. It's not uncommon for companies to worth 10x revenue. In fact, when I do a first pass at company worth, 10x revenue is where I start.

For an experiment ( which I have done), take all publicly traded companies, take their market cap and their revenue, divide, and you get pretty much 10x. Check standard deviation to get even more knowledge about this simple company valuation estimate.

This alone makes it plausible $160B is in the ballpark. Considering the parent company is worth $1.2T, YouTube being worth 0.160T is not that ludicrous.

It would be sold to the public as a spinoff IPO. But if it were to be sold to another company, it would be an all or partly stock deal to avoid the need for a large cash transfer. Stock deals allow these large valuations.

There's a slight difference between the metric you are referencing vs the author's valuation. The author wants to find out the Market Value while you are alluding to the "Book Value" [0]. Alphabet's Book Value (2019) would be around ~ 197M (699M shares * 283.25 Book Value per Share).

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/how-are-book-value-...

Don't companies just leverage the newly acquired company in order to get the money, these days?

The Glazers (or whatever they're called, the US owners of Manchester United) loaded up Man Utd with a lot of debt from... the acquisition of Man Utd. They barely used any of their money.

Face book would buy it in a heart beat

I feel like youtube will be better off with facebook than with google. Also, facebook is already putting effort into their Videos.

I noticed external youtube links no longer get viewed inside facebook, it's probably another step to make their users (facebook) prefer Facebook's videos than youtube

It's kind of money a hostile state would have backed a tech company with to access all personal data.

Like Reddit and China but on a much larger scale.

This nonsense again. If china has control over reddit, how come there are so many anti-china propagandists like you on there? The china subreddit itself is entirely an anti-china propaganda cesspool. Hasn't been anything china related on that sub for years now. Now if you said saudi arabia or israel, maybe there is an argument to be had there. But the china or russia controlling everything narrative doesn't hold up to reality.

If China had control over Reddit, mass-deleting criticism of China would be the stupidest move possible. Everyone would notice, there would be a lot of anger, Reddit would lose a lot of its userbase, and animosity toward China would grow.

Much better to just gently push toward the preferred path whenever a decision comes up. Which is possibly what they actually do with their smallish influence on Reddit. That way things would likely be better for China than they would have been without the interference, rather than likely being worse.

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon would all buy it

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