Webvaluer: Imperfect Site Valuations, but Still Interesting

While I have a number of questions about how it actually goes about its calculations, Webvaluer is an interesting site for taking a crack at the dollar value one might attach to any given web site. Do you work with several sites and wonder what kind of ad revenues or other business opportunities might be possible with them based on the traffic and unique visitors you’re seeing? I hesitate to say that Webvaluer will go about the job using precise science, but it actually did a pretty good job with traffic and unique visitor data in a few test cases that I ran by it.

The first step you take at Webvaluer is simply to enter in the domain name of your site or a site you want to check on.

Once you enter a domain, and hit the Value button, you get back summaries of daily pageviews, daily visitors, and an estimate of daily ad revenue that the site’s traffic would imply. I first noticed this site in this post, which appears to be from the folks who run the site. They admit to the following: “Although it is not an exact science, it gives a decent overview of how well a website is doing. Valuations are roughly based on a 3 year multiple.”

The post also says that Webvaluer “combines data from all across the web, as well as our driven staff who are constantly seeking out new information and  revenue data.” As sketchy as all of this sounds, I actually found it to pull up a reasonably good snapshot of the pageviews and unique visitors for several sites–including smaller ones–that I know the numbers for.

Webvaluer was hardly perfect in all cases. For example, Wired recently bought Ars Technica for $25 million, and Webvaluer gives the site a value of just over a million dollars, which seems way low. It was also way low on traffic numbers for some large tech sites. However, for several sites, I found the traffic reported and the unique visitors cited to be fairly close to what I know them to be. The site also provides an estimate of the number of sites linking to the site you search for, and there again, I saw what appeared to be some reasonably accurate numbers.

I would take this site’s data with a large grain of salt, and I would especially recommend that for the valuations themselves. Also, I expect that you’ll get better numbers for sites that occasionally publish their traffic data.

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