Ask HN: If Hacker News was a startup, what would be its valuation?

1 pointkilimchoi2 comments

Assuming the current business model (free, with no ads), HN's valuation as a stand-alone business should be negative, since it will lose money (hosting, moderation and maintenance costs) as long as it keeps operating.

If there was a commercial competitor to HN, it would have to be significantly better than HN to attract users away from HN. HN's biggest attraction is a relatively small number of very knowledgeable and interesting users, and that would be very difficult for any commercial competitor to duplicate. And without such a user base, an HN competitor would also probably have a pretty low valuation.

HN doesn't make money right now but they can certainly do it if they start to charge companies for making job posts. Currently, companies are posting under a post called who's hiring regularly which will be a significant source of revenue stream for HN. On top of that, there's a separate tab called jobs with a fewer number of companies which HN can charge at higher price. That being said, I think HN offers lots of values not just for average users like us but also for the companies. This can translate into a huge valuation if it were a startup.

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