If you do own a website you probably wondered about the value of it. With value I mean the amount of money that someone would be willing to pay for it. The following information can be very helpful if you need to sell your website, want to buy one or get approached by someone who offers money for your website.
It actually happens quite often that webmasters receive mails from companies or individuals who want to buy their domain. Let us examine some factors that play a role in determining the value of a website project.
Several factors play an important role: The domain name, (unique) content, the age of the domain, the pagerank, visitors, pageviews, revenue, daily work and dominance in a certain niche. The value is determined by analyzing all factors which leads to a price range in the end.
If you want to just quickly calculate it and get only a rough estimate you can simply multiply the earnings with a figure between 6 and 24. That would be the revenue for the next 6 to 24 months. It depends on the site if you use a figure near 6 or 24. Proxy sites for instance normally receive only 6 or even less times the monthly revenue while sites that have earned solid revenue for years will most likely be closer to 12 or more months of revenue.
The revenue method is not always working that well of course. What if you want to buy or sell a website that never used ads on their pages, it would surely not sell for $0. The price for such a website depends on other factors, the most important ones are in my opinion: Content, Traffic, Daily Work, Pagerank and ways to monetize the site. Let us take a closer look at all of those factors:
Now, how do you determine a value of all those factors? One way would be to take the ways to monetize the website plus the pagerank and calculate the possible revenue that you expect and multiply that with a figure between 6 and 12. I would probably use a figure closer to 6 and see how the owner reacts.
Unique content can push the price up quite a bit. If the website offers something that no other site offers you could have to pay for that as well. It is hard to determine the value of content though. Just expect a price close to 12 or even more times if the content is really unique and attracts the interest of a large number of visitors.
Other factors play a role as well. Has the site been penalized by Google, or has its traffic dropped recently because of a Panda / Penguin refresh or another change made to the search engine algorithm?
It is now also important for how long a site has been ranking for particular terms, and if it has a clean backlink profile or shows signs of spam links that drive it to the top for a short period of time before it is kicked to the bottom again.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
Interesting. This is definitely a good post on judging developed websites. Websites are like developed properties with value in them.
That’s some good stuff. Makes me think our price quote tool needs a bit of updating:
http://rank.linkworth.com (kind of plain)
T L A has a cool calculator too..
http://www.text-link-ads.com/link_calculator.php
Also try http://www.adsbay.co.uk/Link_ad_price_calculator.php which i think is more accurate than all the link pricing tools I have tried, but all these tools only calculate the value of internet advertising space, not the value of the website its self, which is what this post is about!
You should also consider http://www.websitefact.com , maybe not so accurate but they have a lot of useful info on how well your site is performing!
I was thinking of selling my website for some time now, some suggested that I should go for ( Monthly revenue x 24) that is 2 years revenue in one go but I think that’s a bit too much monthly revenue x 6 is a fair estimate but still confused.
Great Post!
Very useful, thanks
Fabio
Here it is an website evaluation algorithm I developed myself:
http://www.webuka.com
I have used Google PR, Alexa Ranking, Alexa back-links and Compete Ranking as input parameters.
Enter your URL and you will have a financial evaluation in a few seconds. (your website market price and your potential monthly advertising income).