Be careful - sometimes people make offers to find out how viable your niche is as a business, get some inside numbers as part of their competition analysis.
Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#32I sold a blog with about 1 million pageviews per month and a monthly income of about $1100/month. I valued it at two years income + 1/2 of projected growth income over the same two year period.
wow that seems pretty cheap actually. As an example, unnamed friend got a $40k offer on his blog that had 100k pviews/month and very little monthly income. He just had a passionate following and a decent pagerank.
A passionate following is much more important than a high unique visitor count. I mean look at yahoo, it has (had?) the highest unique visitor count on the entire internet, didn't stop them sacking 1500 workers.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#33How much are they willing to pay? That's what you need to find out.
And what is their motivation--their theory of value? Is there synergy that they can exploit with other products or web properties?
You can set a price you want because you can manage the property as is from your description of the situation. So you can be patient.
If there isn't synergy and you have determined you want to sell I would pro-actively approach other firms that might be willing to pay more than a pure discounted cash flow model valuation based on synergy. For example, if you have a community of chocolate lovers, Hersheys or Mars might be willing to pay more than a media company that would just see incremental revenue.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#34You could try to look at some of the often cited terms from public companies and try to see how you compare. For instance, a publicly traded company in your sector might be valued at a p/e ratio of 10 ( p= price, e = earnings). If your yearly earnings are $50.000 then your company would have a valuation of $500.000.
Remember that earnings is income minus expenses. So this includes the cost of maintaining the site. If it is a full time job then the buyer would be purchasing a 50K job.
Also generally smaller companies go for lesser multiples than larger companies. It really depends on how much time and attention the owner has to put into it. In the case of a publicly traded company that is close to zero for shareholders (unless you own Yahoo). But for a small business you'll have to keep an eye on things even if you do hire a general manager.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#35Take a look at the sitepoint marketplace - http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/
There should some comparable sites that have sold there. Remember also that the people who want to buy your site approached you so they obviously have a plan that should make it worth more to them than the typical marketplace buyer. The probably believe they could triple your earnings easily.
If in the course of negotiations you find things aren't going well you can suggest that it might be better for you to put the site on the open marketplace. If they baulk at that then they are obviously pretty keen.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#36I've heard two independent VCs mention 3-5 times current revenue as a reasonable figure for start-ups, but with this bleak economic outlook, who knows.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#37Net present value.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#38I googled, and found this site. http://www.websiteoutlook.com/ It has pretty interesting information about any site that you want to check. It gives information such as daily page views, and avg daily revenue. Should be atleast helpful.
I ran it for our two primary sites - one returned $5.5m, the other $500k - only ~$800m short!!
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#39So, there are a few things to consider. First, how much work will the new owner need to put into it? $15,000 worth of work per year? Remember $10k only pays for about 5-6 hours of work per week. Second, how likely is it that someone can de-seat your site? That makes it much less likely that the site is worth so much. Third, would a competitor, given a decade, be able to build what you have built with relative ease? T…
So, if your site needs a full-time programmer, it's worthless. I mean, it's worth something to you because it can be your income. However, it's not worth anything to an owner since they'd be paying all of the income to a programmer (yes, even if that's themselves since they aren't getting the site for free).
I think this is false. If the buyer is able to run the site without hiring a programmer then the site provides a valuable income for the buyer. That income is a reward that could make the buy price worth it for the buyer, since the buyer will save the salary of the employee, no?
I think when selling a web site or web application, it's important to choose a buyer that will know how to draw value from it, instead of squander its profits on employees that will do the work that the owner should be doing.
Re: Someone wants to buy my site, how can I value it?
#40First and foremost 30 pageviews per visit is amazing. That's a bounce rate of about 3% which is nearly unheard of (porn site? :)). Asking for 2 years of income is a good general rule. Also factor in growth rates over the next 2 years. Estimate growth based on past growth, not on "well I have this new feature that should double traffic. Factor in any assets you may have, this includes but is not limited to: - Newslett…
No it's not a porn site :)
These are the google analytics stats:
33.80 Pages/Visit
12.81% Bounce Rate
00:14:12 Avg. Time on Site
22.26% % New Visits
77% Returning visits
From your asset list, the last three (High search engine rankings - Good domain name - Industry leader) are true, the first two (RSS/newsletter) don't really apply.