How would you value a new site that's making money?

SandnSurf

SandnSurf

Life's a Beach!
Nov 30, 2006
366
2
0
Australia
How would you go about setting a fair price for a 0 PR site that's only 6 weeks old, but has made around 5k profit with Adsense after expenses? Also done around $100 with MaxBounty and a few bucks with ASDAQ, but I was late to the party with those two.

I know they value sites on monthly x earnings, but usually those sites have 6mths+ track record. But in its favour is that it's an accredited Google News site, so lots of potential, and never been used to spam or keyword stuff...all solid original news items.

Adsense earnings will drop, as news I was promoting has died down, but will pick up again around Sept. Will still do a steady $50-$80 day if you write several stories each day.

Today for example, pushed out couple of stories, and still did 10k+ pageloads and 7200 unique's with 33% of those returning (StatCounter). But adsense CTR was in the toilet today so only made $53. I blame that on the high return rate, usually it's around 20-25%

Quantcast ranking for U.S. (direct measured) is sub 9k. Alexa around 145k last I looked.
G Analytics for past 6 weeks shows total of:
439.667 visits
622,022 pageviews
65% new visits
SE's account for 90% of the traffic
Traffic 90+% from the U.S.

Why am I thinking of selling? Several reasons, main one is it's U.S. centric, and I'm in Australia, so the TZ difference is screwing with me. Plus it's not a sit 'n forget site. I'm spending 2-4hrs in the middle of the night writing stories, moderating comments etc. It was fun at first, but now it's a chore. Plus I've a new opportunity over in Thailand I'd like to pursue, and the $$'s would come in handy.

So would appreciate if anyone can give me a ballpark figure to shoot for, based on the info I've provided. I don't want to screw myself over, but at same time I don't want a buyer getting unrealistic expectations.

And no, I'm not going to post the site in the thread.
 


The typical way to calculate the value of a website when it has a PR of 0 and is a relatively new site is to multiply your average monthly earnings by 12. My advice would be to hold on to the site until it matures so you can get a decent amount of money for it. Or you could just do the 12x monthly earnings thing then tack on whatever you think the time you've put into it is worth. You just might find a buyer.
 
hire someone else as said above to do the hard work. re-invest profits into creating moar sites. rinse. repeat.
 
As someone who buys sites, I can tell you the $5k that you say the site has made is almost irrelevant. There are so many garbage sites for sale and so much fraud that goes on with claimed earnings that a new site with big earnings is almost universally considered to be either a fraud or unrepeatable.

People that tell you a site is worth 12x monthly earnings don't know what they're talking about - that is one of the most repeated, blatantly false things in site valuation and anyone that says it is just repeating what they heard or read somewhere.

If you want a real site valuation, you should probably give some info on your backlink profile and referrers, because PR on a new site is irrelevant. Most of your traffic comes from SE's, but that can be common on news sites with an RSS feed. Typically the site will rank highly for a news term for a day or two and then drop in the rankings.

The Alexa ranking will catch some interest, but here is where you're gonna have problems. How much do you want for the site? If you ask for $30k or less, buyers will assume you don't believe in the future earnings of the site, or you wouldn't sell it at such a low multiple of the monthly earnings. It will reinforce their belief that the site caught lightning in a bottle and that the earnings are unrepeatable. If you try to sell it for more than that, buyers are gonna think you're nuts because the site is new and has no history.

So, you really can't use the earnings as a selling point unfortunately. You can mention it and put it up for sale for $1 without a BIN and a high reserve. This will allow you to see what the market thinks its worth and also allow you to field private offers via PM. Or, you're gonna have to hang on to it and wait until it has a little more history.
 
If you find a sucker you maybe can get like 30k or more for it but personally I wouldn't touch the thing for many reasons (it takes a lot of time to run, it's not old enough and proven, it's tied to only advertising from 1 source) and it's probably only worth MAYBE 10k if you're lucky.
 
Thanks guys for the replies. Going to take the advice and stick with it for another 6+ mths or so.

I know personally I'd feel more comfortable in selling a 6+ mth old site for $XXXXX.00, so if buyer came back later and said site was a crock, I could show differently with x amount of history.

Might have to start selling "strategic news stories" here for extra cash flow ;)

That's the beauty of a GN site, hit top or 2nd spot in GN for your terms, all within minutes of publishing. And indexed for life.
 
excuse my ignorance, but is it hard to get featured in google news? Does it require exceptional content, whats the deal?
 
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