i'm bullish in this market since certain valuations are so low ....
And I'm bearish because valuations are still so high. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're nowhere near the bottom. Not just INSP, but the market.
The buyers in the market are on a very long hiatus and the well-known poster child for manipulative executive hype won't be high on anyone's list of desired purchases just because it's trading at CoH when the odds are looking good for a court stripping it of that cash and forcing it into bankruptcy.
Kerry, you're right about potential buyers but I disagree with parts.
The price tag would certainly be millions, but I have no idea how many millions.
Though the money likely exists here among membership, there's no way anyone's going to get something like that organized, and people here are smart enough to know they'd never get their money back. Before anyone looks at me as a possible organizer, I'll say that as much as I'd like to be the guardian of this content (it's more important to me than anything else about it), I am not the "organizing kind". Although an idea did just occur to me since I'm set up with Verisign and PayPal and have already written the underlying software that could do much of the organizing for me, but I'm sure I'll dismiss that one just as soon as I get finished with this cup of coffee. <g>
I and iHub would arguably be a potential candidate, but the only economically feasible way for that to happen would be to import SI's content into iHub so we could lose the baggage of lifetime subscriptions. And that would depend on whether or not it'd be legal (and challenged) to acquire the site without acquiring the subscription commitments even if the site itself is eventually shut down once the content is safely imported into what's a much more efficient delivery system. No reason to keep the message board part around after that. And for a site like iHub, there just isn't a large enough following that the potential subscription income could even make a dent in the cost, unless a substantial chunk of SI's subscribers became iHub subscribers.
I would consider Yahoo a prime potential candidate.
They could pick it up for a miniscule fraction of their current cash, and have such a huge established user base that they alone could benefit most from deploying it as their for-pay version of message boards. So many that they could shrug off the overhead of existing membership. And being a big corporation, likely have the quantity and kinds of programmers it'll take to change it.
Lycos would also be an excellent candidate. And possibly AOL.
So if the company ever announces intentions to sell SI, I'll definitely get backers (and the whole "SI Bob acquires SI" thing would make a few VCs' ears perk up) and be a bidder, but doubt very seriously I'd be the winning suitor. To me, Yahoo buying it makes too much sense. |
