Jeremy just emailed me a link to an interesting article by Om Malik at Business 2.0 exploring some of the recent sales of web publishers. Of particular interest to me is the analysis of what the acquisition price was on a per user of the sites sold (I’m presuming that it’s daily users/visitors – although I can’t see ‘user’ defined in the article). update: Jon tells us in comments below that he’s confirmed that these figures are monthly unique users.
They have an interesting table which present’s these figures. The last six sales in the list give (the full list goes back to 1999) acquisition prices per user as follows:
- MarketWatch – $80
- About.com – $22
- Ask Jeeves – $44
- MySpace – $36
- Weblogs Inc. – $10
The average of these prices is $38 which later in the article they use to ‘value’ some other publishers including Slashdot’s owners, Gawker Media and Boing Boing.
While the $38 per user figure will probably be argued and it’s not really valid to apply it across the board like this (looking at my blogs I know for sure that different types of traffic to different sites generates vastly different amounts of income) – I thought it was an interesting way to look at things. I’m not taking the figure to seriously – but lets have some fun with it and play a ‘hypothetical game’:
The questions that come to mind when you see the $38 per visitor figure are:
‘how much is your blog worth?’ if you were to value it at $38 per unique visitor on a daily basis and ‘would you sell it for this figure?’
Here are my answers…
ProBlogger would be worth $110,238. Would I sell it? It’d be a tough decision. The site doesn’t make me that much directly from advertising revenue but it’s valuable to me in other ways – probably beyond a $110,238 figure. update: with these being Monthly figures and not daily I’d definately have to reconsider this as it’d take it over 3.3million.
My total collection of blogs (not including b5media’s) average about 30,000 – 40,000 unique visitors per day (depends upon how much news is going around) which if we took it at a 35k figure would make them worth $1,359,389. update: Once again – I with the figures being monthly this would value my blogs at over $40million – I think it’s a pretty safe bet that I’d be selling :-)
Once again as I ask myself the question of whether I’d sell or not I’d be in two minds. While that kind of money would of course be tempting I’d also have to consider numerous other factors including the revenue those sites currently bring as well as their projected growth. Again I’m not sure I’d accept that kind of offer.
What are your blogs worth using the $38 figure? Would you sell?
