$0.<p>As soon as one of the VCs cracked a joke—no matter how classy or appropriate—HN would inform them that the pitch meeting was in fact "not Reddit", and that humor is not tolerated—thereby killing the deal in the process.<p>The VCs would instead proceed to allocate the funds to autism research, reaping the tax benefits in the process.
Price would be determined by the market given it has no revenue. I imagine a VC firm would consider buying it for low single digit millions.<p>Though the difficulty would be that the brand is so attached to HN that the VC firm might struggle to get the brand value.<p>Also, given that they have around ~20 million visits per month according to similarweb it could probably make $10-100k per month if it charged for job ads.<p>It could also probably sell ads and do ~$30-100k/month from that based on a ~$3 CPM.
It may be compared to similiar content aggregators, therefore not much? As a social platform, I am not sure this community would be easy to monetise: what kind of premium service would YC offer on top of the freebies? For one, I would think of a gamified approach to YC services like one-to-one briefings, networking opportunities, dedicated pitch sessions and so on. Karma acts as a gamifier already, so the currency is there.
I think there's a bunch of pretty strong cases for the value of HN. Look at what it does today: feeds people into YC programs, helps (especially YC) startups hire hackers, gives YC folks a megaphone to a massive and devoted technical audience.<p>Thought experiment: imagine Techstars owned HN. How much would YC pay to avoid that fate?
It doesn't work as an independent startup. That's a little bit like saying "If we cut a person in half, how much productivity do the legs alone provide?" The answer is that after you cut them in half, they would be dead and neither half would provide any productivity.