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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

Question: Where is the 15 million worth of USP here?

Anyone can throw up a buzzfeed copy in a day, so theres no usp in the site itself...and you're not buying genius talent like with hunch.com, so...

What are these valuations based upon?

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You don't have to build a fancy web 2.0 user-generated social-local-mobile app to be worth something. As long as someone has created value for a lot of people, then whatever you have built is worth a lot.

PS: from personal experience I find extremely hard to ditch my favourite blogs and news sites, while I ditch my favourite social/mobile/local apps on a regular basis, but maybe that's just me.

What keeps you going back to those blogs and news sites?

Buzzfeed supplies many other sites with metrics analysis to help them react ahead of time when some article or whatever has gone or will go viral. Theyve gotten good at finding early indicators of this, leveraging their whole network. I'm sure there's more to it though that's my understanding and probably something at least as valuable as their user-facing site itself.

You seem to be under the impression the value of a company is somehow related to lines of code, it's not.

It's like saying techcrunch is worthless because it's just a wordpress install with fancy theme, or flipboard is worthless because it's just an RSS reader.

Code is just a small part of what makes a business successful and defensible.

Not really, USPs come in many forms.

But I'd be interested to hear your views on how buzzfeed is defensible?

Most probably the 25m monthly unique visitors. Building that sort of traffic is extremely hard.

Yep, I covered that in my reply to yurilifshits. The traffic is the main value prop here.

Aside: Do you have a link to the 25m figure?

Assets are (1) audience, (2) editorial team, (3) content archive, (4) proprietary data and insights on viral content

However, the valuation is based on chances for future success rather than on the current assets. Investors see bigger gains ahead.

Point by point:

(1) hard to copy. (2) Could be replaced by a clever algorithm. (3) Not worth much. (4) Valid, but with time can be copied and bettered.

I believe the key here is the audience. Assuming they have some traffic numbers that show virality and repeat visits...but still, 1 mil is as far as I'd go for what is, essentially, an RSS reader sucking up APIs.

"(2) Could be replaced by a clever algorithm"

lol

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