Show Me the Money

By Shamus Posted Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: Links 27 comments

A reader sent me a link to this, which tells you how much your blog is “worth”. Ask it how much Twenty-Sided is worth, and it will tell you:


My blog is worth $277,189.14.
How much is your blog worth?

$277k as of May 11, 2007.

The question that I would naturally ask when reading this is “to whom?” Because it isn’t really worth a quarter-million until someone is really willing to pay that much for it. I suppose their calculating this based on what people have been paid for similar-sized blogs.

But even that has never made much sense to me. Who would buy a blog? Let’s assume my blog was not burdened with all of the money-making difficulties of DM of the Rings. (As in, let’s pretend I wasn’t using stills from a major motion picture that preclude making a profit.) How much is the blog worth? If you just want the traffic and the audience and you think it would be easier to buy a popular blog as opposed to buying a new one and advertising, then you might consider putting down some money for a popular blog. But the new owner probably won’t be able to give people a good reson to keep coming back (if he could, he wouldn’t need to buy someone else’s site) so visits will taper off. People will stop linking the blog. In six months the blog would be worthless again.

Having said that: If there is someone out there with $277k who wants this site, I would like to let you know that I’m totally ready to sell out. Thank you.

 


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27 thoughts on “Show Me the Money

  1. Doug Brown says:

    Great. We’re going to have to band together in an inspiring display of community spirit to outbid the evil corporation that wants to buy you out and turn you into a soulless moneymaking machine. Again.

    Firstsies?

  2. Dr-Online says:

    Best Ending comment ever

  3. Marmot says:

    I call dibs on your “Rants” section, ‘kay?

    That’s a bit bizzare criteria, I find (after having skimmed through the entire thing). But how can it know your number of visitors (if that plays a part in calculation) retroactively, since it hasn’t been tracking anything before you asked it?

    I’ll ask my friends, maybe someone has a spare 277k laying around unused :)

  4. Mordaedil says:

    Your views on gaming coincides with a growing niché of the market. I assume most of the “worth” of your blog comes from DM of the Rings, but you have a lot of ideas that are just very inspiring. If I become a Game dev, I’d definitely “research” (read: steal) a few of your ideas.

  5. Rask says:

    Mine’s worth exactly nothing. Prolly because it’s just another LiveJournal site.

  6. Dev Null says:

    Maybe its “worth” that much because they reckon you’ve put that much work into it, and/or we the commenters have collectively wasted that much of our employers time reading and commenting. This would fall into the fairly normal gaff of equating the cost of something as its worth, instead of what you can really get for it.

    But surely if you did sell it, any reasonably estimation of its worth would assume that it came with the writer; as you rightly point out, under a new owner it wouldn’t be the same place. So before you sell out for a quarter mil, check the fine print and see how long you’ve signed yourself up for…

  7. mom says:

    I think the value is based on revenue from traffic if there is advertising attached. I suppose SOMEONE could generate that income if your site was optimized for advertising for that person. I wonder how much income IS generated for the people who advertise on your site. You can not really SELL the site because if YOU aren’t writing it, the traffic would go away.

  8. Brian says:

    I believe I got a much more realistic value for my blog. It estimated the value at – roughly – $0.00.

    Take that.

  9. Heath says:

    My blog (http://the-heath-bar.blogspot.com/) is valued at basicly $0.00 like a few others have posted.

  10. DocTwisted says:

    I’ll help pitch in to keep the blog Shamus’s!

    (Pulls out pockets and starts counting)

    42 cents and the missing button to my work vest… not the best of starts.

  11. My secret suspicion is that they’re wildly inflating the value so as to flatter people like you and cause you to link back to them. If they told you your blog was worth $4.95 (which is probably closer to the truth) would you have put up their logo with a link back?

  12. Patrick the Evil Twin says:

    I suppose this all depends on what previous blogs have been sold for, what some blogs of similar size take in in terms of merchandise and advertising blah blah blah…. like you said. But I think the big thing is, what does the person who made this little gadget piece of software consider a blog? Penny Arcade has dozens of things that make people visit each day, most notably the comic, but there also is a typical ‘blog’ on it as well. Does that make the whole site a blog? Hell, ESPN.com has atheletes post a ‘blog’ during brief stints ( such as for 2 weeks prior to the superboel, the weeks leading up to the draft, blog their experiences during thw world series ) Does this make the whole of ESPN.com a blog? \
    and the big thing is probably myspace. Myspace is really just a collection of millions and millions of small crappy blogs that no one really cares about. But the whole of myspace sold for some ridiculous amount of money, 500 million dollars i think ( thats 500,000,000.00$ folks) When whoever made this gadget software for estimating blog worth, I’m sure they used myspace as part of the algorithim. But did they divide the 500 million between the 50 million blogs on myspace, or did they divide by 1? If they did it the right way, then according to the sale of myspace ( if it really was 500 million, and there really are 50 million individual blogs on myspace, I’m just estimating here) then each page is worth 10 bucks.

    kind of skews the math a bit……

  13. Patrick the Evil Twin says:

    once again I am forced to point out the lack of spell checker.

    I would say your lack of one even though Ive told you before to get one de-values your site to a paltry $277,179.14.

    Loser…

    Did you go see spiderman3 yet by the way? call me ya dork…

  14. Robin Z says:

    If I recall correctly, this was actually an old joke mocking some blogs that got sold for (what was perceived to be) wildly inflated prices.

    I can’t find the post, though. It was a year or more ago.

  15. Yes… $1,811,608.86! In other words, the thing is broken. Someday Technorati will delineate between links on a page (I have a chicklet on the theme I built that points back to my blog) and links in content. Until then… I at least can dream.

  16. Shamus says:

    I think Steven has nailed it, although for some reasons I always find the cynical answers to be the ones that appeal to me the most.

    I wish this thing could look back in time: I’d love to see what http://denbeste.nu was worth back in its heyday.

  17. Stephen says:

    I have no idea how they reach that figure, but here’s what I’d do.

    How much money do you get from ads? ($X)
    How much money do you spend on bandwidth? ($Y)
    How many hours do you spend on the blog? (Z)
    What hourly rate does your labor command if you spent that time working your best paying available job? ($A/hour).
    What interest rates are banks in your area offering on deposits? (Lets say 5%).

    Your blog brings in profits of [X – Y – (Z*A)]. That’s an income stream. How much cash would you have to put in a deposit account to earn that much of a yearly income stream? *That* is what your blog is worth. That’s the typical way of evaluating the value of a going concern like a business.

    $277k in deposits at 5% would net ~$13,850 a year or $1,100 a month. If you paid yourself a competative salary, would you also make $1,100 a month in cash on top of that? If so, then yeah your blog is worth 277k. A bit less because it is a riskier investment than a deposit account. A lot less because it is encumbered with legal problems.

    Feel like sharing the real numbers? We could work it out.

    -Stephen

  18. My blog is another zero-worth one. So whatever you’re doing, it must be valuable!

  19. Raka says:

    But the new owner probably won't be able to give people a good [reason] to keep coming back (if he could, he wouldn't need to buy someone else's site) so visits will taper off.

    I take issue with this logic, at least in general application. There is something to be said for momentum; once a site has built a strong brand and can boast a large number of regular readers, it’s much easier for anyone running that site to stay big than it is for those same people to get that big starting from scratch. Even if the content changes somewhat, the old readers willing to give it a chance plus new readers brought in by links to old content will give them many opportunities to attract interest. It’s similar in concept to the recent shocking revelation that paying for some artificial diggs will result in a much better chance of earning a good number of genuine diggs.

    On the other hand, I don’t think that concept carries over particularly well to single-person blogs. It’s one thing if Tom’s Hardware just starts getting a different group of hardware reviewers doing the same thing the old crew (led by eponymous Tom) was doing, or if the Table of Malcontents switches its staff of professional aggregator/commentators. It’s another entirely if the sole reason for reading a blog is replaced by some executive’s nephew.

  20. Robin Z says:

    Here it is – it’s based on when AOL bought Weblogs Inc. for about $25 million. Which is why the data is iffy – there’s exactly one genuine data point in there, and it’s not really an accurate measure due to several other factors that Tristan Louis lists in his post (first link).

  21. Kevin says:

    $0.00. I felt bad until I realized I wasn’t the only one. LOL!

  22. Paul says:

    As I understand it, someone calculated the total, combined Technorati ranking for all weblogs created on Weblogs Inc., and divided the purchase price AOL paid by that number, giving a dollar value per point of Technorati ranking…or something like that. I do know it uses your Technorati ranking to make the calculation.

  23. Huh. It can’t just be an LJ thing… it claims my LJ to be worth $6,774.48. :)

  24. Jacob says:

    I have two blogs, one I’ve had for a bit that has *some* technorati ranking and one I just broke off that contains the technical articles from the first and two or three new posts since then. Here’s the curious thing: the old blog is rated as supposedly worth $0.00 and the new one $1,693.62. I find that hard to reconcile with anything like rational sense…

  25. Browncoat says:

    If I had a blog, I’m fair sure it would be worth somewhere in the range, just as an approximate value, roughly, less than zero. Perhaps less than that.

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