The value was driven by the size of the user base. We gave each user an arbitrary price but didn’t understand how to turn that into actual money. So if you had a website with 30M users it was valued at $900M. The late 90s early 2000s were wild times in VC, and some lucky people realizing how nonsensical all that was cashed out on time.
Mh, a website with 30M DAU or WAU is today worth 1b USD at least (if you cant monetize on 30M users, then the product has a problem?)