Ok, so we won't be trading Justin.tv on the NASDAQ... did anyone really expect to?
I think we should be more focused on profitability - not IPOs. Honestly, the chances of any of us creating an IPO-worthy company are pretty slim. But, as long as we create profitable companies, then we're set. And you don't need 1B page views / month to be profitable.
If you're generating cash, there's no pressure to find an exit strategy. And if you do want out, there will ALWAYS be investors willing to buy you.
It might not be quite so solid a fact. I've worked on websites with closer to 20m visits a month, and they've been able to swing deals for slightly better CPMs. I suspect that many sites with over 100m visits would probably see advertising opportunities open up if they're aggressive enough, especially if they've been able to collect even a small amount of demographic information on their visitors. So the linear relationship is probably not definite.
1B views=5M$ is an approximation to first order. I'm sure I could be convinced the CPM is off by a factor of 5. However, there's got to be a fairly hard minimum sales/month for an IPO: I didn't know it was $60M/year.
If your goal is to form a business that will make the founders rich, it's good to have some numbers floating around in your head. Maybe I was the only one, but I didn't have these numbers in my head, and I felt they were educational :)
I think we should be more focused on profitability - not IPOs. Honestly, the chances of any of us creating an IPO-worthy company are pretty slim. But, as long as we create profitable companies, then we're set. And you don't need 1B page views / month to be profitable.
If you're generating cash, there's no pressure to find an exit strategy. And if you do want out, there will ALWAYS be investors willing to buy you.