Michael Arrington posted an article this morning called Modeling the Real Market Value of Social Networks that uses a similar approach more data (and a better granularity of data) than the blog I wrote last week on the same topic. It's absolutely worth reading, so check it out.
(And Mike, thanks for the shoutout in the article!)
His blog concludes with the following chart, detailing valuations:
As you can see, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and Hi5 are all in the top 4, but interestingly enough, you also have companies like Ameblo.jp, Buzznet, Skyrock, Mixi.jp, and a bunch of other companies that have not quite entered the Web 2.0 discussion. Obviously it's looking at data like this which prompts those kinds of questions. In particular, thinking about the role of international traffic in social networks drives awareness of the fact it's harder to monetize.
After all, a pageview is not just a pageview – you have to think about where it's coming from, where it's being displayed, when it's being displayed relative to the user's session, who it's being sold by, and a myriad of other constraints that determines advertising CPMs.