How much is this site worth?

Value of a database-driven community site

[Haary2006]

Hello @ all!

I would like to know an approximate price-range for the following website:

The database-driven website attracts highly sought advertising in the health categories. The site also contains social community forums and personal blogs, which help to attract new users and to increase time spent on the site. The website generates 24 million page views per month from 500,000 unique visitors, with an annual growth rate of more than 125% in both. Currently the site has 300,000 registered users and the growth of new registered users is similar high.

Where can I ask this question? Is there a special forum in the Internet?

I think it is a common question for many website owners whose site has grown so much that other companies have become interested in acquiring the site.

Thanks.

[edited by: Haary2006 at 4:33 pm (utc) on Sep. 18, 2006]

[LifeinAsia]

How much does the site generate in revenue right now? Most people today buy sites or businesses based on real revenue. The days of astronimical amounts paid for potential future revenue are long gone.

[sodani]

I think that even if the site generates no revenue at all, it's probably worth a good amount if it has 300,000 members because it would be easy to monetize that.

[edited by: rogerd at 5:34 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2006]

[sodani]

By the way, digital point might be a good place to ask.

[rogerd]

For years, you practically couldn't give a community site away because they tend to be heavy consumers of server hardware, bandwidth, and management time.

Now that it's possible to monetize community sites, there's more interest. Valuation will still be tricky. If the site is monetized now, that revenue stream will provide one way to come up with a number. It's likely that the best buyers, though, won't be looking at your Adsense dollars but rather how well THEY can monetize it. So, ask yourself these questions:

1) Would the effective CPM revenue be significantly higher if the site was part of a large, important site?

2) Are there businesses that would be able to market their products or services effectively to my user base, i.e., monetize my site with their own products?

If you answer either of these with a "yes", then you'll have to try to figure out what the site would be worth to those particular buyers. Not easy, but you've got to make assumptions and move forward.