capitalists -- is eager to find and bet on the next big thing. Still, the money being thrown around is mind-boggling. Even a decent business model and the potential for growth do not justify a multibillion-dollar valuation. Yet, Facebook recently offered an astounding $19 billion to buy WhatsApp, a popular messaging service. Though WhatsApp has reportedly been able to turn a small profit, this overblown acquisition price is higher than the market cap of 275 companies in the S&P 500. Some market watchers have argued, as Michael Wolf did on CNN.com, that the WhatsApp acquisition is indicative of a fundamental shift, and that traditional old world methods of determining valuation have been replaced by new world metrics. For example, Wolf cited Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp at $42 per user, which is in line with price-per-user acquisitions of companies like YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram. This is one way of looking at things, but it's severely flawed. The value of a customer is in the revenue the customer provides, not in his or her mere existence. If we look at the price-per-user metric without evaluating revenue per customer, the analysis becomes eerily similar to the late 1990s, during the dotcom boom when, for example, number of eyeballs was a metric used to evaluate technology companies. Counting eyeballs or user base or potential only works in a bull market when market