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Second dot-com bubble
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There has been speculation of a second dot-com bubble to succeed the first that occurred roughly between 1995 and 2001. Some refer to it as Bubble 2.0, as many companies involved are in the Web 2.0 sphere, like Skype, Facebook, and Google. Various suggestions have been proposed as to why there may or may not be a second dot-com bubble. Evidence for a second dot-com bubble High stock values Many commentators are saying that many of the dot-com companies are overvalued due to their monetary size. On the 1 November 2007, Google's shares were valued at over $700, 7 times the amount of the IPO for the company. It also valued the company at US$219 billion, making it the fifth largest company in the United States. On 24 October 2007, Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in the social networking website Facebook for US$240 million, making the company worth US$15 billion. High P/E of technology company stocks Some of the major technology companies have high price-to-earnings ratio figures, which may mean that they are overvalued (over 25 means they may be overvalued). This includes, as of 1 November 2007: Google at 55.17, Apple Inc. at 48.00, Sun Microsystems at 42.15, at 55.96 (compared to just 24.37 for Microsoft), and 21.13 for AT&T. High values in purchased companies This includes Google purchase of YouTube for US$1.65 billion in 2006, eBay's purchase of Skype for US$2.6 billion in September 2005 (both mostly in swapping shares), Intermix Media (owner of MySpace) by News Corporation for US$580 million in 2005. Another example is the online radio station Last.fm being bought for US$280 million by CBS Interactive. Evidence against a second dot-com bubble Proper businesses The companies being acquired today are real businesses, with lots of customers or viewers. Rather than working on just speculation, Facebook has (as of January 2009) more than 150 million active members worldwide. Another key difference with the earlier dot-com bubble is that companies now have a model of how to make money from the Internet — and that model is based on advertising." Too few companies and too small to make a bubble Facebook, Youtube, Myspace and Skype can't constitute a market bubble let alone one comparable to the dot-com bubble of 2000. The reason why the earlier dot-com bubble is called so is because it wiped out $5 trillion in market value of technology companies from March 2000 to October 2002. List of companies significant to the bubble *aQuantive *Baidu *Bebo *Digg *DoubleClick *eBay *Microsoft *MySpace *News Corporation *Something Awful *Skype *VMware - its IPO was valued at US$19 billion *Yahoo *YouTube 
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