The valuation is high, but it isn't unreasonable. Also I view AirBnB as having a low risk of falling out of fashion, unlike Zynga or Facebook.
Looks like they charge a 3% fee meaning a night @ $100 would bring in $3 of revenue (not profit). At 30M nights that's $90M in revenue, putting the $2B valuation at 22.2x revenue... seems slightly unreasonable (at least not a valuation that public markets are likely to put on it). Thoughts?
Your numbers start to look a lot better at a 10% fee instead of a 3% fee.
The total airbnb fee on a stay is about 12% (lets assume 9% avg guest fee and 3% host fee). But roughly 3% goes to credit card processing fees and then you have to deal with paying out in countries like Brazil where paypal and ACH aren't viable options. Lets just net it out to 9% for discussion purposes. Average price per booked night when I worked there was $100+.
If you do the same math as the post above then revenue would hypothetically be $270MM, as a revenue multiplier the range we're talking about begins to seem possible for a company on this trajectory with organic growth.
I have a vested interest in a high valuation, but having seen the growth from when I first joined (feb 2011, celebrated 1MM nights booked the first week I was there) to now its really unbelievable - true hockeystick growth.
see: (1) network effects (2) organic demand