>Today that station would sell within a week for at least $20,000,000.
Yes. The license for a share of the spectrum alone is worth something. And there are FM radios in cars. And I wish I had bought that cherry bathtub Porche when I had the chance, too. That would have been a good investment.
There should never be a spectrum sale on the internet, though people aware of the model keep trying to set up bandwidth constraints artificially. Nobody will ever surf the net while driving their car, or at least I hope not. Cellular phones are enough of a menace.
As many competitors can get into Yahoos market as desire to. Probably the curve for that will resemble the curve for ad money, after a while. The real business being, not navigation, but websites that are attractive enough for whatever reason to get their share of the advert pie. I have already had advert offers for my small site from companies that bundle thousands of small sites together and sell the same ads on all of them. Thus getting the millions of hits a day required to compete with yahoo.
I doubt that thousands of FM engineers would have tried to discourage you, back when. But thousands of programmers might tell you that they are completely bemused by the search engine company phenomena in the stock market, where companies with a totally clonable idea, easy to produce software, no lock on market, no patents or copyrights of meaning, and no operating earnings, are valued so highly.
Now, I use yahoo, sometimes. And I think they may turn a profit, from operations, eventually. I hope so. But for a billion dollar cap to be justified, they would have to be looking at earnings in the hundreds of millions just a few short years from now, if you viewed the rate of return on current stockholders investment compared to say the interest on government bonds, which you would hope they would beat, given all the hype.
One of the phenomena of the bust cycle in computer tech is that at the end of each cycle nearly all of the small companies that made things exciting are wiped out. Kaypro, Sinclair, Commodore, where are you?
The survivors mostly had real earnings on operations nearly from the start - Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Compaq come to mind. So did a lot of the extinct ones, in fact. I'm trying to think of a big success story that ran for 3 years with no earnings in this business, without massive new investment from without. Can you? |
