If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)
Compare that to acquisitions like Aardvark ($555/user) or Jaiku ($240/user), and it becomes clear which were likely technology or talent hires. The glaring exception is Yahoo’s famous $5.7 billion purchase of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in 1999 — about $11,000 each for 520,000 monthly active users, or 10 times any other startup. (Broadcast.com skewed the chart so much, I had to leave it off.)"
Source: Wired, 10th April 2012
Note - see the full post for lots of excellent charts, and analysis of cost per employee
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