I think the challenge I see is "wife" when really you're talking about general services. TaskRabbit already address the service sector and you can hire someone to perform a number of tasks to help you manage your life.

On the upside, prostitution is a huge industry which equates to a large total addressable market.

Correct. I've used HomeAway for two vacations. Their focus has always been the traditional vacation home owner. 99% of their listings are an aggregate of other perfessionally managed 7-day stay rental homes. Completely different business model, technology, culture, market, etc. HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples has remarked multiple times they see little to no overlap in their customers & listings. See his answer about half way down this 2011 WSJ article: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/10/13/homeaways-ceo...

Great points. I think Airbnb competition will emerge beyond the international copycats (Wimdu). Their biggest risk is other small startups picking apart niche markets within he greater accommodations vertical. Others have thrived like crashpadder (acquired by airbnb) or Onefinestay.

I think in two years you will see more Airbnb's in the accommodations marketplace competing on price and experience. The market has room for Marriott, and super8.

Valuation is based on the total addressable market for travel and other markets, not what they are booking today. If this growth continues their revenues will certainly justify the valuation even before moving into adjacent markets.

Thanks hoodwink, appreciate the feedback. I posted hoping someone else would give it a sanity check. The numbers I was seeing were 100x what others have guessed.

> I really didn't have a clue in estimating the average room costs. I did a sampling of the various geographic areas with high booking rates to come up with $80.

> Also it's impossible to know the seasonal effects on the data. I'm wondering for example what effect the Olympics had on the run up to 10M.

I'm the author of the blog post. I have a significant interest in Airbnb's traction because I'm the founder of a collaborative consumption startup (ToolSpinner). Airbnb is leading the entire sharing industry so I have a deep interest in the company as a learning tool. I crunched the numbers because I couldn't find anyone else that had. Most other numbers I had seem were dramatically less than what I was seeing. Most blogs, TC, Twitter, others all just say "Airbnb hit 10M wow".

I don't really care about traffic to my tiny lame blog. My interest is in the growth of the sharing economy, I just thought I'd post it to share my thoughts and see what others think.