Cuban vs YouTube

Usually our practice is to rephrase the top stories of today’s highly dynamic web 2.0- sector, but this one we decided not to amend it and, instead, just quote it below:

Cuban: Only a 'moron' would buy YouTube

In one of our earlier blog postings we were saying that Major labels and movie/music and IP producers might slow YouTube down, and it seems this topic is heating up the web.

According to some media outlets YouTube representatives were not found so far to give comment on Cuban’s words.

Full story

Our vision: Despite all copyright infringement lawsuits expected to flood into the company once it gets bought by a bigger player, we think YouTube is undisputed leader in the video sharing business on the web and the site itself is within the top 10 world’s most visited sites with plenty of space to grow further, including capitalizing on the TV/WEB merging.

We think a deal for YouTube today in the range of $1B and $2B is viable and it includes all payments expected to occur from copyright lawsuits that are expected to happen over the next years.

MySpace could be valued at $15B

Analyst predicts social networking site could hit this mark in just 3 years from now, citing user/usage growth and international appeal.

Social networking site MySpace could be worth about $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast Wednesday.

RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan said he had come away from a meeting with Fox Interactive, the managers of MySpace, believing that "media investors may not fully appreciate what has already been done with MySpace or what may lie ahead." …

Just to remind that MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million just a year ago. Pretty good deal then, pretty good deal now.

RBC Capital justified the forecast on the basis of MySpace's "raw, unprecedented user/usage growth and they also added that it could be anything in-between $10B and $20B in the next years.

Full CNN story

In fact, we could pretty much agree with them, knowing that MySpace is amongst the top 10 web sites on the web, just behind Google (valued more than $100B), Yahoo and Microsoft’s properties, also valued tens of billions.

Zillow, is $57M enough?

According to Zillow they have raised around $57M from venture capital firms (Technology Crossover Venture, Benchmark Capital and PAR Capital Management), private investors, employees and directors.

Zillow.com is an interesting concept that provides algoritm-based home valuation services across America and according the web site they cover more than 67 million homes in the states.

The traffic boosts (Alexa around 1000) and it looks like the web site is going to make it. However, the algorithm based valuation technique employed in the site seems pretty incorrect at some of the tests we performed.

What also makes the story watch-worthy is the fact that this company seems over funded, which in the web 2.0-era is not something good considered by number of professionals and industry – annalists.