Meebo has raised a $25 million round at a valuation north of $200 million, according to several reports. This after the company originally hired the investment bank Montgomery & Co. to help with a sale but never got to its price.

The startup's cross-platform IM service has been growing like crazy. Meebo says it has 29 million active users who send 150 million message a day.

The Meebo round come on the heels of Ning $60 million round that had a pre-money valuation of $500 million, or 3x its valuation from a year ago.

Then there was Slide's last round of $50 million round, which valued the widget-maker in the same half-billion dollar ballpark.

What all this says is that venture capitalists are willing to place bigger bets on companies with millions of users, even those that don't have much of a revenue story yet, in the belief that dollars will follow the eyeballs.