Twitter buying SoundCloud?

[Fade]

http://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-reported-in-talks-to-buy-soundcloud/

Hmmmm... What would this mean? If they do, I hope they don't mess with it because SoundCloud is good as is.

 

[SoberMindedMuzk]

Soundcloud is like my main web site. Homebase. Don't know if this is good or bad. Makes me kinda nervous tho.

 

[wrightboy]

Fuck...guess I gotta stop using SoundCloud now.

 

[thedreampolice]

Why? twitter is awesome and nothing has happened yet.

 

[SoberMindedMuzk]

The update says Twitter backed out.

 

[thedreampolice]

Its probably for the best I have a feeling soundcloud has a tough time making money. Of course so does twitter, I will never understand one company buying another and NEITHER one has EVER had a profitable year. I mean I love both of them and use both everyday, but those kind of economics are not sustainable.

 

[Professor-Khaos]

Its probably for the best I have a feeling soundcloud has a tough time making money. Of course so does twitter, I will never understand one company buying another and NEITHER one has EVER had a profitable year. I mean I love both of them and use both everyday, but those kind of economics are not sustainable.

Do soundcloud really do so badly? I would've thought they make a fair bit on pro plans and the like?

 

[Nel-E-Nel]

Damn, I was going to pay for an unlimited yearly on Sound Cloud, should I not do it anymore?

 

[Fade]

Ya now it says they backed out http://online.wsj.com/news/article_...4579574301592373722-lMyQjAxMTA0MDIwMDEyNDAyWj

 

[SoberMindedMuzk]

Its probably for the best I have a feeling soundcloud has a tough time making money. Of course so does twitter, I will never understand one company buying another and NEITHER one has EVER had a profitable year. I mean I love both of them and use both everyday, but those kind of economics are not sustainable.

I respectfully disagree on both fronts, but especially Twitter.

 

[thedreampolice]

@Sober really you don't like either company? How come?

@Khaos the network infrastructure and cost to run soundcloud is really high at 40 million users and 200 million listeners, its tough to get accurate numbers on them but a rule of thumb is that only 1% of your users will pay for the premium products. So lets look at the people that may pay compared to the free users. We can guess and get a ballpark of 3-400k paying users (they have 40 million registered users and not all registered users are active. So lets say 300k x $130 a year thats 39 million a year in revenue or 3.25 million a month in revenue and I doubt very much that is enough to pay all the server and network costs, pay staff ETC, just the electricity alone to run that many servers is in the tens of thousands a month I would guess. We also can take a pretty good guess that soundcloud is not profitable as they are still get seed and funding money from venture capitalists. Once in a while a profitable company gets VC money if they are seeing rapid growth and need to expand, but its rare. If a company is profitable they usually prefer to fund their own growth and then they dont have to give away equity in the company. At any rate, these are of course all educated guess and ball parks. There could be other factors that I am missing. But its fun to think about