What’s the “$” Value of your Website?

BY Mar. 08, 2010 45 Comments


Did you ever wonder how much your website or blog is worth?

A few months ago a friend of mine invested $100 into my website. He has his own company that’s worth several million dollars, so this was more as a joke. But the other day he asked me about his $100 investment, and if it has grown. So I had to figure out a way to give a dollar value to my website. After much research and negotiation I learned a lot. I’d like to share with you what knowledge I acquired.

First here are some factors that come in to play:

  • Your money and time invested
  • Site statistics
  • Site potential
  • Target audience
  • Revenue and profit

Multiple of Profit

The classic way to determine the valuae of a business is to use a multiple of the profit. Profits is simply: earnings – expenses.

Earnings: determine your yearly revenue. Do so by adding up your earnings from Adsense, Clickbank,  Buy Sell Ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored tweets, etc. for each month.

Expenses: estimate how much time you spent building the site, hosting, domain name, marketing etc. for the year.

You can them apply a multiple to the earning which typically varies between 5 and 10 depending on how fast the business growing.

Does it make sense for an online business, website, blog to be valued in such a way? Not always. Look at a site like Twitter that has no revenues and is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Online Tools

If you search “website valuation”, you will find a variety of  tools designed to assess a website’s worth based on many different factors. They all use formulas based on on a combination of domain age, page rank, inbound links, Alexa ranking, traffic, indexed pages and compete rank.

Let’s compare the value of www.ben-lang.com on four different tools.

As you can see every service has drastically different values.  Clearly, online tools aren’t very helpful.

Highest Bid

There is another method to determine the value of any product or service and it is simply to ask potential buyers how much they are willing to pay for it. This is why eBay is such great source to find out the value of about eveything.

So you have two options:

  1. Look for a blog or website similar to yours  that was sold and for how much. It’s not easy to come across such information, but if you put time in to looking it may happen.
  2. Find a few potential buyers and ask them how much they are willing to spend on your site. Not sure how realistic that is either.

PS: Ben-Lang.com is not for sale :)

Any suggestions, ideas, feedback?

Making Money, Online Business
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  • http://www.drinkwhat.com steve

    Nice information! My website worth $35 LOL. Just curious, how old is your friend if you don’t mind telling other people?

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Don’t worry those online tools can give you the craziest numbers. He’s in his late 20′s. Thanks!

  • http://www.createasuccessfulblog.com Jack Cola

    I was considering selling one of my websites, but you may spend hours working on a website, but if it doesn’t have the traffic it is worthless.

    Unless of course you have wrote a web script that someone really wants. But if it is just a Joomla, or WordPress blog, you will get squat for it.
    .-= Jack Cola´s last blog post: Choosing A Blog Name And Why It Needs To Be Perfect =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Yeah that’s true for those selling websites. Part of that is establishing a flow of traffic to the site…

  • http://www.creditrich.net Marc Augustine

    I had a site of mine up for sale last year and it was valued at the higher value of 10x(monthly earnings) vs cost of development

    My site had solid income so the multiple of earnings was the higher value.
    .-= Marc Augustine´s last blog post: Shelf Corporations – the reason why i got into this business =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      That’s a solid value. Hope it sold well :)

  • http://agentdeepak.com/ Agent Deepak

    The tools give some crazy numbers. Some give too high and some too low. I have rarely seen any tool which gives an approximately correct value.

    Best way to know the value is evaluate for yourself.
    .-= Agent Deepak´s last blog post: Interview with James Richmond – The InfoPreneur =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Yeah, or crazy high or low numbers. Definitely or ask someone else to evaluate it…

  • Dennis Edell

    If I may ask, how exactly did he “invest” $100…..gave you 100 bucks for a new header or something?

    This is actually a serious question, in case you thought I was funnin’ ya. lol
    .-= Dennis Edell´s last blog post: UPDATED – $100 – 10 Winners – Comment Contest! ‘Till Months End… =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Basically, I sold something for him on eBay and he decided to let me keep the sale in exchange for an “investment” of my decision. So I decided to invest it in a theme, some ads etc. Glad you asked.

      • Dennis Edell

        Does he actually receive a ROI or was that part just joking?

        • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

          Maybe one day he will, we’ll see!

  • Dennis Edell

    I wanted to add, aside from the tools which are bogus, lol, you did give some excellent advice on how to actually figure worth.

    Thanks for that. :)
    .-= Dennis Edell´s last blog post: How Do You Cover SEO *Per Post*? =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Thanks, I appreciate your feedback. Nice question above, I should have clarified that in the post.

  • Oni9balusi Bamidele

    All the data provided by all those websites are inaccurate, the best option as you said is to look for potential buyers and know how much they would want to pay(but it is important for the person to be conversant with the online world or else they will just talk about ridiculous prices that may annoy you).
    .-= Oni9balusi Bamidele´s last blog post: 7 DAYS TO ONLINE SUCCESS 3 =-.

  • http://shirleyszone.com/ Shirley

    Hehehehe, I love how you said your site wasn’t for sale :D , funny :D . Umm…I think no one should do business with Website Value Calculator cos they would just put you out of business, hehehe :D .

    So were you able to find the dollar value of your site and give it to your friend/investor :) ?
    .-= Shirley´s last blog post: TweetWorth – How Much Is Your Twitter Account Worth? =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Hah, I thought I should add that because people tend to give their sites’ values when they’re selling which I’m not… Yeah I was able to figure out although it took a while :)

      • http://shirleyszone.com/ Shirley

        That’s great :) .
        .-= Shirley´s last blog post: TweetWorth – How Much Is Your Twitter Account Worth? =-.

  • Latief | AnotherBlogger

    Interesting dear brother and I just played with your tool and the result is really fantastic for my not two months yet blog, lol!
    I’ll check it again after next PR announcement, let see if there any changes for better PR blog :)
    Thanks Ben for sharing.
    .-= Latief | AnotherBlogger´s last blog post: Join LinkedIn And Promote Your Blog =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Glad you think so. Well using the tools probably won’t give you anything accurate, I highly recommend that you use the “Multiple of Profit” method. Your very welcome ;)

  • http://phillipdews.com Phillip

    Hi Ben,

    Loved this post I just had to RT it. I am currently working on a post about Procrastination after @socialnate suggested it to me. lol. Anyway getting back to this post, I just used 2 of the tools you suggested here for my blog phillipdewsdotcom and thrown up some crazy results $5,080.80 on cubestat and $78 on WSVC (websitevaluecalculator) then done the same for googledotcom $2,190,000,000.00 on cubestat and $742,166,748 on WSVC.
    Anyway loved this post buddy! All The Best

    -Phillip Dews

    p.s. My site is not for sale either! HeHe
    .-= Phillip´s last blog post: Am Writing an Ebook! Heres the Cover =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Hi Phillip,

      I’m so happy that you really loved this post. Just be careful using those tools, they’ll never give you anything accurate! Hope to see you here again. Best regards.

  • http://www.bloggingtips.co.in Blogging Tips

    My blog is worth $15899.4 on website outlook
    .-= Blogging Tips´s last blog post: 49 ways to get more traffic =-.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      If only it was accurate.

  • camerabags

    Wow those values are all over the place. I would pick the high one. LOL I have my first site for sale right now so I will se the value soon.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Haha, yes they are and none of them make any sense at all!

  • Henry

    Hi! You can also try http://www.estimix.com – a free tool that provides a nice summary of the website performance.The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Thanks for sharing that tool, looks a lot better than the ones I used :)

  • http://www.scotwork.com.au Ty

    Be interesting to see what a website will ACTUALLY sell for in comparision to the tool.

    anyone have any results to feedback?

    Negotiation Training

    • http://ben-lang.com Ben Lang

      Looks like a great tool, thanks for the share.

  • http://www.websitevaluebot.com website value

    Thanks for the valuable info on website value calculating, when valuating a website you should also consider http://www.websitevaluebot.com as it will give you a value based on every aspect of the fundamentals of a website except for revenue which is the only real way to work out a websites value.

    For true value of a website you should calculate monthly revenue times 6-12 depending on brand name, age and content and this is the reason no website estimator online is accurate.

  • LoveWebsiteValuationTool

    hi all, I have a similar website valuation tool and I am trying to find an affordable coder to adjust the its metrics and to develop other plugins for it.

    regards
    Michel

  • Reach Tips

    Thanks for educating on website value. I hope I will be able ot use this information to increase my own websites value!

  • Aurelian

    a new one for you people! http://urloz.com – estimated traffic, earnings, value, backlinks from major search engines, social media posts, whois data, google and alexa rank, relevanta website data, keywords statistics, site age, code validation… the data can be downloaded as a .pdf file!

    there is also a firefox add-on that once installed allow users to get any webpage data with just a click of the mouse without visiting the urlOz website!

  • mlakolm

    I prefer and recommend – FREE PROFESSIONAL REAL GENUINE WEB SITE VALUE CALCULATOR AND SEO INFORMATION at: http://www.worth-website.com

  • http://www.facebook.com/WeDateLivecom We Date Live

    does anyone know where can i find how much http://www.rentapixel.com , worth?
    tnx

  • http://www.linuxhosting4u.in/ Anand

    I donot think that online website value calculator shall be good way to judge the value of any website.

  • Bazz

    http://www.pass4fun.co.uk/ how do I value my website its for a driving school in wolverhampton we have a pagerank of 3 does this website have any real value?

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Prosite-Seo/100003487786526 Prosite Seo

    best website estimator http://prositeseo.com

  • http://twitter.com/AllMotoReviews allmotoreviews.com
  • Asdfrg

    fazoool

  • marginean marius

    check out the APE Soup also from APEmix! you won’t be disappointed!

    here is the link: http://apemix.com

  • http://www.speeddome.net/ Güvenlik Sistemleri

    I thank you very much for your post. These are the informations which I was looking for and necessary for my school project. I wash your posts to continue.

  • Salci21

    http://video-llamada-facebook.blogspot.com No va la videollamada en Facebook 

  • Rich