One of the trends that I suspect we’ll see more of in 2005 and beyond is Blogs for Sale. This past year saw Jeremy Wright sell his blog which proved that its possible – but the question it leaves me wondering is – ‘How Much?’
How much would you sell your blog for? How would you determine the asking price?
I’ve done a bit of searching around on Google and so far haven’t found too much quality advice. So far the main opinion I’m seeing is that you either sell it based upon one or all of the following three characteristics:
1. Domain Name Value – If you’ve got yourself a highly sought after domain name you might be able to sell that alone – the buyer could scrap your site and build their own. In a sense this is like selling your home that is falling down knowing that the buyer will knock it down and build something else – they’re paying for the land. Domain name value can range incredibly – loans.com apparently sold for $3,000,000 for example….
2. Traffic – Most of us don’t have a domain of that high a value – but that doesn’t mean our blog is worthless. Traffic levels are obviously another method of determining the value of a site. Highly trafficked blogs obviously have a higher potential for earning than those with no readership. However determining the value of traffic is the tricky part. I’ve seen people value traffic at anything from $3 to $10 per hit per day. By this equation a blog with 1000 impressions per day would sell for anything between $3,000 to $10,000. The downfall of this approach is obviously that some traffic is more valuable than others. A blog that is personal in nature for instance might have 1000 daily impressions but they are harder to convert to income than a blog with 1000 impressions that writes on the topic of plasma screen TVs.
3. Earnings – a more logical approach to me would be to base your asking price upon current and projected earnings. To do this your blog will of course need to be earning something to start with. Again there are different opinions around the web as to how to use current earnings to assess a blog’s value. Some say you should expect 6 – 8 months earnings as a price (ie a blog with a daily income of $100 would sell for between $18,000 and $25,000), while others calculate a site’s value as being 2 years of current earnings (ie a blog earning $100 per day would be worth $73,000). Again this doesn’t really help much as there is such a huge difference between these methods of assessing value.
I suspect we’ll just have to wait and see what sort of figures are generated by sales over the next year or so. In the mean time however I’m very interested in how YOU would calculate your blog’s sale asking price? Leave your thoughts below in comments.
