Ultimately, the issue right now is nobody really knows how much users are worth. There's a lot of speculation that if your site has a lot of users (20 million o

Ultimately, the issue right now is nobody really knows how much users are worth. There's a lot of speculation that if your site has a lot of users (20 million or more), your company is worth a lot of money. Even if you really have no idea how to monetize those users without pissing them off. There's an assumed value there that may not match up with reality. Facebook's IPO is relevant here. Once more information comes out, we'll have a better idea of how large user bases (like Facebook's) can be monetized and what it takes to extract the value. Things could go either way after that, and it all depends on how the market reacts to this information. My hope is that the software industry can weather this storm, and that its now diversified enough to deal with investors pulling out of the startups amassing users and shift to focusing on startups selling to SMBs or enterprises. There's bound to be some collateral damage here, but hopefully it'll be minimal.