Simon at Bloggasm has been asking himself a question that I hear increasing debate over ‘how much money is a blog worth?’
Simon’s seen attempt to put values at blogs which seem overblown (for example the one that Dane came up with at Business Opportunities which was based upon the WeblogsInc sale to AOL and how many inbound links they had. Simon rightly points out that the values that system gives are somewhat inaccurate (problogger is currently worth $2.45M!). I don’t think anyone ever took the Business Opportunities measure as a seriously accurate measure (for many reasons) – however Simon’s pushed on to see if he could come up with a formulae for calculating a blog’s worth.
You can read his methodology and calculations here (problogger is worth $151,457 under this system).
Of course, no formulae will ever be able to give you an accurate figure for what a blog is worth because there are so many factors to consider. Simon’s methodology breaks down because it is based upon Adbrite and BlogAds (ad systems that work well in some niches but terribly in others). To show it’s inaccuracy I look at my own blogs and can see that while ProBlogger is worth $151K in this measure I have a blog that earns 10 times as much that is worth just around $10K.
Having said that – it’s nice to see someone attempting to get their head around the question and I think Simon’s done some reasonable work.
Ultimately a blog is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it – a figure that is based upon many things including it’s income (current and projected), it’s influence, it’s dependancy upon the blogger (and whether they’ll continue once it’s sold), it’s incoming links and SE ranking, it’s longevity, type of readership (ie search engine, loyal readers, RSS) the blog’s growth curve, domain name value, traffic, the topic etc.
Some of these factors can be measured but many can not.
Would you sell your blog? How would you value it?
