I like these numbers. As someone pushing an Open Source based business along, Open Source businesses selling for huge prices is a nice thing for me to see...XenSource went for 500mil not more than a month ago. Zimbra 350mil. Both sit either side of us on the continuum of applications (and we've got a mail stack with webmail like Zimbra, though not as advanced, and a virtualization management product more feature-laden than XenSource have).

I'm gonna act like I don't know any of y'all when I'm cruising around on my mega-yacht. That's all I'm saying.

cool. now we can wait for 2010 before they integrate it into Y!mail -- considering yahoo bought oddpost in 2004 and it took 3 years for the new yahoo mail to come out of beta....

Oddpost -25 million. I remember that very well. Because it was on the cover of Business 2.0 - 'the new road to riches', or something like that.

Its interesting to see Google try and accomplish the same goals (marketshare in the online office space) through much smaller acquisitions (writely, zenter).

Implicit suggestion here: That Yahoo's wasting their money.

Zimbra's a very mature product that's already making money. The company's also reasonably old. Compare that to Writely and Zenter, which were both purchased before large-scale release and while the companies were brand new. I think this is probably a pretty good buy for Yahoo.

I think that with the figures Paul Graham gave us on Yahoo Store, that acquisition payed for itself around 2 years ago.

All I know is what their revenues were. I don't know their costs, so I can't guess how long it took to pay for itself.

At the first Startup School in Boston someone mentioned that Yahoo Store had about 235,000 stores and $5 billion/year in store revenue, if I'm remembering correctly. The smallest available monthly fee(1) is currently $40 and the smallest transaction fee is 0.75% thus their annual revenue must be greater than (235000 x 40)+($5 billion x 0.75%)=$46.9 million. I'm guessing it's rather a bit more than that.

1) http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/plans.php

It is unlikely they have 235,000 stores. I would guess at most 30-50,000.

Now I'm curious about this. They list 71,245 under "shop by store."(1) However, I think this number may be low.

Are inactive stores listed in that directory? I'm sure Yahoo is billing for more than a few stores which never got beyond intentions.(2) We set up a test store a few hours ago "filmat16.com."(3) It's not been published yet so there's nothing there. It's also not listed in the directory by name (although this may be a function of time.)

If the $5b sales figure is correct (and I wish I could remember the original source of those numbers) and we use the 71,245 store count that's $70,180 per store/year. Reasonable?

Also my original estimate didn't take into account the (currently) $50 setup fee or fees for credit card processing (outsourced, but surely they make a bit from that), DNS fees, advertising revenue, etc.

In any case I think Yahoo has made rather a lot of money from their purchase of Viaweb - which is good for people creating startups which might be bought by Yahoo etc.

1) http://shopping.yahoo.com/stores/sd.html Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

2) If that number is in any way related to the percentage of people who don't send back rebate forms it could be huge.

3) Not a completely for testing purposes; we're going to sell some 16mm films that have been sitting around in a closet for years. http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

> Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

No. Any web store can be in Y! Shopping.

You're right. I see that now. I would like to understand better how many Yahoo stores there are, how many are inactive, how many use the different services Y provides (shipping, inventory, etc.) Is it fair to say that Yahoo hasn't added many features to the stores since Viaweb? There are a lot of functions which Yahoo store operators have to perform which Yahoo has never added provisions for.

Really, what figures? I always figured Yahoo was making more than that... Yahoo Store is expensive and popular.

I think the name alone is worth a hundred million.

Do they mean cash as opposed to equity? I don't know much about business transactions of this nature, but "in cash" conjured up images of briefcases filled with unmarked bills.