The value was driven by the size of the user base. We gave each user an arbitrary price but didn’t understand how to turn that into actual money. So if you had a website with 30M users it was valued at $900M. The late 90s early 2000s were wild times in VC, and some lucky people realizing how nonsensical all that was cashed out on time.

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KellyCriterion 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Mh, a website with 30M DAU or WAU is today worth 1b USD at least (if you cant monetize on 30M users, then the product has a problem?)

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ben_w 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Much harder to monetise users in 2000, even that many.

If you sold stuff directly, handling transactions was still a pain; PayPal had to be invented, and that was only 1998.

If you ran on advertising, you had to invent the ad network and convince people to buy ad slots.

	▲	KellyCriterion an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Na, I meant today: I would happily buy your 30M DAU weppage for just 1B USD today :-)