My Site is Worth $1,481,760!

June 15, 2007

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Well, at least that’s what DnScoop.com told me. This is a site I ran across two or three weeks ago and I found it to be an interesting find. Just plug in a URL and it will run a report for you which includes:

Age of the Domain
Google PageRank
Number of Inbound Links
Traffic Rank (from Alexa)
Number of indexed pages in the major search engines
Domain IP Report
Estimated value of a single link from Text Link Ads (which, of course, DnScoop is an affiliate of)
The Site’s Estimated Value

In my case, it estimated my largest site, PC Mechanic, to be worth $1,481,760. Horrah for me!

I have no idea what their algorithm is to calculate this, but the factors they list are great leading indicators of a site’s value. As common sense will tell you, the more ingrained a site is into the fabric of the internet, the more valuable it is. So, you want a lot of incoming links, indexed pages, etc. With that comes PageRank. And with that comes increased value and increased pull for revenue.

Ultimately, a site is only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it. There is no solid method of appraisal of a website. I’ve heard some people say a good estimate is 2 times one year’s revenue, plus value of the content and software. That sounds fair, however it just isn’t cut and dry. There are some sites out there with a huge value potential, but are not making any current revenue (or very little). So, using revenue alone as the price determination is just not accurate for all sites. For an e-commerce site, sure, that makes sense. For a blog or a content site, probably not.

Value online is directly proportional to the attention you get and the eyeballs you attract. It’s that simple. If you’re a blogger, for instance, and you have thousands of visitors and readers, your site is fairly valuable even if you make hardly any money with it. And that’s because you command attention.

Just for giggles, I ran reports from DnScoop on my other, much newer sites including this one. As of now, WebbyOnline is worth $1,620. BUZZscreen is worth $35,391. PCMechTV is worth $36,914. PC Daily Tips was worth only $495. The fact that it appraises Buzzscreen so much higher than Webby was actually a big suprise to me, considering that Webby is actually a pretty active site and gets more traffic. In checking out the reports, the reason seems to be that they found significantly more incoming links to Buzzscreen than to Webby. It looks like they are using Yahoo Site Explorer to judge incoming links, so perhaps Buzz just happens to have been spidered more by Yahoo than Webby. I also used to link directly to Buzzscreen’s latest posts from PCMech, which no doubt helped. Since Webby is not computer related, I didn’t really do that. Similarly, PC Daily Tips gets more traffic than any of my other blog sites right now, and it was valued the lowest. Of course, a lot of that traffic is direct from the large mailing list we have there, so that means we have traffic without the quantity of incoming links. Mailing list size is obviously not something DnScoop would be able to take into account.

That right there certainly illustrates that DnScoop isn’t entirely accurate. It’d be nice if they included Google in counting incoming links. Especially with the crappy nature of Yahoo Slurp, a lot of people (including me) limit or ban Slurp altogether.