Website value - learning from the big kids

the value of a visitor

[ardent]

A recent CNN/Money article on big-money internet deals had an interesting kernel. If you look at the major sales over the last year the average selling price for a site was $38 per monthly visitor. Caveats abound.

This was a new number for me. It's actually a value that's much higher than previous valuation metrics - even for high eCPM sites.

Bubble-era buyouts are back
High-traffic Web sites are monetizing eyeballs again. Here's what's different about this time. [money.cnn.com]

Based on recent high-profile Web content deals, the value of a unique monthly Web site visitor currently hovers around $38 -- the average purchase price per unique user in acquisitions over the past year.

[FalseDawn]

Interesting - although I think it only really applies to larger, well branded sites with visitors in the millions.

I'd sell my site with 3k monthly uniques for $100K in a nano second :-)

[akmac]

That sounds high. At that rate, a site with 1000 unique visitors a day would be valued at almost 14 million. Any webmasters here who wouldn't sell their sites for $38 per unique visitor/2005?

[Matt Probert]

That doesn't just sound high, it smells of something brown and bovine....

What a lot of nonsense!

Matt

[JollyK]

Hahahaha! Oh, HECK yeah, I'll sell you one of my 50K visitors a month site for 1.9 million dollars! I'll even cut you a deal and sell you my 7000 members for the low, low price of 250K. That's a savings of $16,000!

And I'll throw in this set of Amazing Ginsu Cleavers!

Where do I sign up?

Especially considering that the money I'd make on the interest from the 1.9 mil (not to mention the 250K) is about a bazillion times more than the site itself actually makes.

But, shh! Don't tell the investors. It will be our little secret.

In all seriousness, though, I guess I can see $38 per unique visitor if you're in the millions of visitors, particularly in a sticky or high-paying niche site. It just seems awfully dot-com-boomish (read "unrealistic") to me at this point.

JK

[HRoth]

That stat is not quite accurate in terms of the article's argument. They basically took the number of visitors that the various businesses purchased had and divided the purchase price of the company by that number. So this $38 really has pretty much nothing to do with the price of a visitor. It has to do with the price of the company and how many visitors that company had.