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Ask HN: How much is a utility website worth?
A friend of mine (for real :)) received an offer to buy a website he owns and he's a bit lost as to the valuation of the deal.
The site is a certain utility application in use by users all over the world. The service is free, the site requires minimum maintenance, and the sole source of income is AdSense.
100% of incoming traffic is organic, and the site is ranked 4th on Google for the site's keywords.
Raw data:
- 6K daily absolute unique visitors
- 110K monthly absolute unique visitors
- $1200 monthly revenue (AdSense)
- Google PR 6
Any thoughts on how he should approach this proposition? How this deal should be valuated?
- sagacity 16y agoTo the best of my knowledge, the going rates (at Flippa etc.) for sites generating revenue solely via AdSense are anywhere from 10X to 15X monthly revenues. Also, in general, the more the age of the site and the longer the traffic/revenue history, the more comfortable the buyers are; even willing to pay higher monthly revenue multiples on long track records. Furthermore, all this (what I mentioned above) is usually for content sites. Since your friend has a utility app, it could fetch more value. I'm assuming all traffic is 100% organic. At valuations like this, I guess the potential buyers will perform a lot of due diligence on traffic sources, quality (and quantity) of backlinks, proof of traffic history (i.e. logs) and revenue history (AdSense account screenshots etc.). Be prepared with all this and then name a price. All the best, HTH. :-) Edit: Fixed minor typos
- viggity 16y agoI'm guessing that the 10x to 15x is for someone who is purchasing and looking to slowly build it or use it for recurring revenue. The company that is looking to make the purchase might be looking to do a lot more with it (bundle it with their current products, etc) and it might be worth more than 10x to 15x. Ask them what they plan on doing with it. Also, how much work would it take for them to replicate?
- bmelton 16y agoCompletely agree with all of it. I personally wouldn't accept less than 12x monthly revenues for even a content site, but for something as turnkey as this, they're either betting that they can extend the app or easily increase traffic to it significantly. The other consideration is that if this is a PR6, that should fetch a premium as well -- I don't know how much additional that factors in, but I would try to ask for at least an additional 25%, and see what happens there.
- viggity 16y agoWhat is PR6?
- profitbaron 16y agoPR is Pagerank. Which Google uses for its Algorithms. However, despite what people tend to believe a PR6 isn't that hard to obtain.
- bmelton 16y agoNo, but the average Pagerank for a site for sale on Flippa ranges from 2 to 4. In the scheme of a valuation, wherein the seller is trying to get the most value for his property, it's definitely a consideration.
- sagacity 16y agoAs a matter of fact, the PR (as shown on the Google tool bar) ceased to be (anywhere near to) an accurate measure of the real pagerank (the actual algorithmic score, as calculated by Larry and Sergie's formula) of a website's link popularity many years ago. If you do have the Google toolbar installed on your browser (probably not,) you may have noticed sites showing PR 0 (i.e. a white bar) ranking above sites with PR2, 3, 4 or even higher.
- profitbaron 16y ago100% of his income off is off Adsense and its pulling in $1200/month? You should tell him to look at the advertisments which his users are clicking on, THEN replace the adsense ads with CPA advertisements (of which the users are clicking on) and make even more than that per month as well as, diversify and protect income if he gets banned by Adsense.