I'm Interested In Purchasing a Website

30,000 - 40,000 Daily Uniques

[fidibidabah]

I'm interested in purchasing.. lets say.. a 'fonts site'. This site gets bettwen 30,000-40,000 uniques daily. I was wondering what a decent offering price would be? If it's a little more then I can afford maybe, would it to fair to offer the owner 'x' amount and then 10% or so of my revenue for the next year? (Written contracts, of course). I'm just curious what you people think someone could make with this 'fonts' site and whether it would be worth it. The current owner doesn't do much with the site, it's very old fashion looking and looks like it doesn't make much revenue. Any suggestions are appreciated :)

[john_k]

Thanks for the feedback. I guess my quandary is that if I continue to own and operate the site, it will likely bring in X dollars in the coming 12 months. That assumes that I don't make any further investment in time/energy/dollars. Were this prospective buyer to simply add links to some of their existing sites, as well as make nominal mention of the site in their other outlets, the site would bring anywhere from Y to Z dollars.

I recognize that there are a lot of other variables and uncertainties. Some of them could be cleared up with a few violations of the forum TOS:)

Anyway, my position will be that the site (as-is) is inherently more valuable to them than it is to me. And it would be valuable enough that they would probably want to own it. At the same time, they realize that the site could never be as valuable to me as it will be to them. I should therefore expect that we will arrive at a number somewhere between 1.5*X dollars and 1.5*Y dollars.

(There could be a lot of generalized uncertain ambiguity here! At least I think there might be.)

[rharri]

John_K,
I know this is pretty naive, but, if all your site needs is the links and wider coverage, why not negotiate a deal with the potential buyer to provide that for 1-2 years and see where it goes? Both sides would benefit from having a solid experience to base an eventual sale on.

rharri

[Macro]

The assumption that the site will be more valuable to them doesn't help you negotiate your price up, I'm afraid. It's speculation. Any smart buyer would dismiss that assumption right at the start.

rharri, you've raised an excellent point. Do a deal with them. Show them what your site can achieve for them in the next 12 months. THEN start negotiations again. If I was your buyer I'd jump at that idea.

On the other side, if the $3,600 was entirely profit, then probably the upper level would be $50K. This being the amount that a person would have to put into a high interest account to earn $3,600 risk free in a year.

Small flaw in that logic ;-) The interest bearing account will still be worth $50K if I die tomorrow. With a site there are several ways you could lose your entire $50K. Also, the interest bearing account is liquid. I can convert it to cash almost anytime I want.

[jomaxx]

If the buyer's promotion of the website is likely to increase the site's traffic and earnings by 10X to 100X, I don't think you can call that "nominal". That's obviously a huge input into the equation.

It may seem like a drop in the bucket in relation to the size of the potential buyer, but big companies didn't get that way by overpaying for acquisitions.

I think you have to look at 3 basic guidelines. They won't give you a number, but can at least give you a framework for thinking about numbers:
1. How much you can earn from the site
2. How much the site can be expected to earn for the new owners - over and above what they could earn by devoting the same amount of promotion to other revenue channels
3. How much it would cost them to build a site roughly equivalent to yours from scratch

[tictoc]

Does anyone have a good list to go buy when purchasing a website?

[George]

I have found in buying and selling web sites, that it is never any good talking about what might happen. The value might crash, you might be banned by Google, msn and Ink, and your domain on a spam list.

History is all you can go on (Ignoring brand here).
Anyone selling saying, "you could do this and that", I say, well you do it then. Why are you selling? If all it needs is promotion, then promote it.

How much would they charge for links off their network?

As a real world example, a friend recently bought a garage. He bought it for about 80% of the sum of 1 years profit, and the cost of the equipment second hand. This is the going rate for a small business. And yes, that is profit not earnings.