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Ask HN: How to Estmate the Value of a Website

by kmc059000 on 5/12/22, 7:17 PM with 2 comments

I recently received a received an offer to purchase a website I run. The website in question has no revenue but is a good candidate for ad revenue.

I have been unsuccessful in determining what kind of ad revenue the site could generate so that I can decide if the offer is fair or not. Using the various online tools which estimate values, I am getting estimates of $500-$2.2m for the overall website value. Obviously this is less than helpful and absurd on either end of the range. The site in traffic receives six figure daily users with ~10m of engagement time which makes me think ads would have decent monthly revenue.

Does anybody have advice or tips in determining how much a website is worth?

  • by roosgit on 5/12/22, 8:15 PM

    Maybe it would be a good idea to contact a broker. I think they would be able to more accurately value your website. I know @patio11 sold one of his websites on FE International https://feinternational.com/. Of course, you are only looking to estimate how much your website is worth, so it’s possible they only start working on the valuation once you decide to sell. I don’t know.

    Hard to say with precision how much money you’d make if you put ads on your website, but this one (https://online-solitaire.com/), mentioned a couple of times here by its creator, is making $10K/mo. From the traffic you have I would guess you should be making at least 1K/mo and looking at the multiples on Empire Flippers https://empireflippers.com/marketplace/ then the selling price should be at least $50K.

    So it’s definitely worth much more than $500 and less than $2M.

  • by jppope on 5/12/22, 7:38 PM

    Use Spyfu, SEMrush, or Google's keyword planning tool to see how much they charge for ads on keywords related to your content. Since you know the traffic (and hopefully your SERPs) you can estimate the total traffic for your site and competitor sites. This will give you a feel for the market. Reach out to the owners of comparable sites (not your competitors) to see how much they are making in ad revenue (Aka if you do shoes, talk to the people that do boots)

    Using all of these supplementary data sources determine the possible annual revenue of the site (within a range of outcomes). Take that number and value it like a business (Revenue, costs, etc) and charge a reasonable multiple for what it would earn the new owner in the next 3-5 years (3x - 5x ARR is standard for service businesses, products can be higher). I would also recommend adding a 20%-40% increase on whatever your number is to aid in your negotiations.

    Good Luck