Image by: Valerie Everett
By Gordon J. Pruitt
You have a successful website that generates tons of traffic and yields some pretty satisfactory ad revenue. It has been a steady earner for a year or so, and you couldn’t be happier with the results. After all’s said and done, your site brings in hundreds if not thousands of advertising dollars per month.
That’s great, but can you say how much it is worth? Lock, stock and barrel – if someone were to buy your website from you, what would the valuation be? You don’t know?
You should know the answer to that if you are in the business of making money (aren’t we all?). And we’re not talking about what you think it’s worth here – we’re talking about what the market knows it is worth.
I Think I’m Going To Cry
It’s your site, you have an emotional attachment to it. So, you are exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be assigning a real world value to your website. So now what? What person, place or thing should be entrusted to calculate the value of your website?
Enter the world of online evaluation. There is an entire industry devoted to calculating the value of your website. A great tool to start with is ClearWebStats. It took the free service 45 seconds to evaluate my website and deliver baseball player like stats on everything from traffic to social engagement.
It said my site was worth $720. Yikes.
To The Highest Bidder
Then there’s Flippa.com, where site owners post their domain name along with sales and visitor data in hopes of attracting a buyer. Buyers bid on the sites auction style. The “buy it now” price is basically what the site owner thinks his or her site is worth. Yes, that sounds a lot like eBay.
For example, Warstuff.com was listed with a buy it now price of $85,000. The site, established in 2009, has nearly 6,000 uniques a month and an annual revenue of $1500. So far, just one bid of $25,000. But it hasn’t me the reserve price and there are only 16 hours left.
Stay tuned to Flippa to find out what happens. Or better yet, click here and Flippa will give you a free evaluation of your site.
Brokering A Deal
Many people warn that only a trained professional – such as a broker – can accurately value your site. And the people that warn this? Brokers, of course. But they have a good point – each website has something about it that only a human can decipher and properly calculate into your site’s worth.
BizBroker24.com is one such company stocked with brokers that will personalize your valuation and help you sell your site for the largest amount possible, or so they claim.
Numbers Junkies
The proliferation of websites that put a price tag on your site – Google “how much is my website worth,” I dare you – has also given rise to America’s newest obsession: Watching the value of the Internet’s biggest sites. Much like we fixate on the box office numbers for movie releases, obsessive geeks keep an eye on “the charts” to see if there has been any movement.
There hasn’t been much, at least not at the top of the charts.
In terms of overall site value, Google.com is way out in front at $8.325 billion with second-placer Facebook.com worth $4.163 billion. But unlike the movies which are constantly changing, this chart obsession with the values of top websites is a real snoozer. Watching new sites rise up the charts – that is the truly exciting stuff.