Feb-03 | Blogger | $20 million (rumored) | |
Jul-04 | Picasa | Under $5 million (rumored) | |
Jul-04 | Oddpost | Yahoo | $20 million (rumored) |
Jul-04 | Webshots | Cnet Networks | $71 million |
Jan-05 | LiveJournal | SixApart | $20 million (rumored) |
Feb-05 | Bloglines | IAC (AskJeeves) | $25 million (rumored) |
Mar-05 | Flickr | Yahoo | $30-35 million (rumored) |
May-05 | Dodgeball | Around $10 million (rumored) | |
Jul-05 | MySpace | News Corp | $580 million |
Sep-05 | Skype | Ebay | $2.6 billion |
Oct-05 | Weblogs Inc. | AOL | $25 million (rumored) |
Oct-05 | weblogs.com | Verisign | $2.3 million |
Oct-05 | Upcoming.org | Yahoo | Around $1 million (rumored) |
Dec-05 | del.icio.us | Yahoo | $30-35 million (rumored) |
Jan-06 | WebJay | Yahoo | Around $1 million (rumored) |
Feb-06 | MeasureMap | Less than $5 million (rumored) | |
Mar-06 | Writely | Around $10 million (rumored) | |
Aug-06 | Grouper | Sony | $65 million |
Sep-06 | Rojo | SixApart | $10 million (rumored) |
Sep-06 | Jumpcut | Yahoo | $15 million (rumored) |
Oct-06 | YouTube | $1.65 billion |
So yes, Google is paying $1.65 billion for youtube, Ebay spent $2.6 billion on Skype (making the Google/YouTube deal look like a cheap deal), and News Corp. paid $580 million for MySpace (making them look frugal compared to the other two big deals) but the truth is that, across 20 major deals, those 3 stand out as the exception and not the rule. It appears that, on average, deals are generally below $50 million and, in most cases, lower than $10 million.
Bubble 2.0?
I’m sure people are going to call me out on this because I’ve previously warned about the possibility of a new bubble being created. However, at the current time, it seems the data does not support that conclusion yet.
What it appears to support, however, is an interesting calendar anomaly: it appears that major deals generally happen in the 4th quarter of the years (either that, or I got my data set wrong)
Another interesting point is that I haven’t found any other chart of that type around the net. So I figured this page can be a starting point. Hopefully, faithful readers will help me fill this chart with more data points so we can do more granular analysis