Jane_Doe - 6:27 am on Jul 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

the true value of your site is what you can make out of it.

Exactly. I have a hard time believing that anyone who hangs out here would seriously only look at under a year's worth of current earnings in valuing a site, unless they are trying to convince people their sites are worth less than they really are so they can buy them for a low price. There are many important factors to look at when valuing a site - links, penalties, topic, sandbox status, pages of content, quality of the current content, uniqueness of the content, etc.

Earnings potential of a site depend in large part upon the skill and experience of the site owner. When you buy a site the owner changes to you, so what matters is what you can make with the site, not what the previous owner made.

Buying a site based on current earnings to me seems like trying to apply an old school MBA process on a totally new type of industry.

Would you rather have a site that makes $5 a day but has 100 pages of good content and 1,000 one way links from authority sites, or a site that makes $40 a day now, with only reciprocal links from low quality sites and 30 pages of poorly written content? Personally, I know which site I could do more with.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 6:40 am (utc) on July 1, 2005]