Famous tech acquisitions’ cost per user
I do not like charts like this because their existence implies that cost per user somehow matters, or is a deciding factor even, in the price of an acquisition.Even if that was the major metric in determining a price, there's often a very large difference between the number of users currently and the expected number 1 year or 5 years out.You don't buy a company because of the number of users it has right now. You buy it because you think you can do something better with it, or to be defensive in a field, or to expand your own customer lists.What's more, not all users are created equal! When Flickr for instance was aquired, what percentage of users were paying users?I think its hard to make any real generalizations here, but better than a chart of cost per user, I think this is probably closer to a chart of how badly Company X feels it needs some audience. It's some formulation of growth, panic, defensiveness, etc.