If someone wanted to sell a site with a similar user and traffic numbers, in your opinion, what would be the present worth in 2007 dollars, 2002 dollars, and possibly 1999 dollars for a site like news.ycombinator.com.
Should it vary by site content? Reddit turned into a general purpose social news site, but Hacker News is more of a niche thing. Would a larger corporation buy a site like this? I'm not saying they wouldn't; I don't know how it works, maybe someone could explain.
It would probably be worth more as a web application that allowed you to pretty much run your own reddit or news.ycombinator than as a "hacker news" site. A larger corporation might buy it for the actual software, not the audience.
The software is trivial, or close to it. Sure, there are a few smart/hard bits, but any competent developer could resolve them with a month or less of development time.
Building a community is much harder than building a simple web application like this one. And not that by saying this, I'm not trivializing News.YC, I'm just saying you're placing value in the wrong place.
This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.
