When I was younger, my mother was an antique collector. She collected antique glassware before it was hip to do it. After her collection was quite full, she would still love to go hunting. She always came home with a huge smile on her face. “I love to go antiquing! I see the prices and I feel so rich!” She had grown a collection out of a passion and later discovered the value of her investment as a bonus.
I recently read an article about the valuation of a website. Analyzing sales of websites over the past 5 years or so yielded data that translated into valuing a website based on unique visitors per month. This data came from well-known websites and little known sites, the transaction of their sales and then laying the money exchange next to the other stats of the website. Bottom line: Each unique visitor is worth on the average 38 dollars.
Only a short passing comment was made to mention a slightly added bonus of registered members.
This got me thinking. I dug into my urchin to take a peek at the stats of my website. I found daily unique figures. Nope, I didn’t multiply that by 30 to get my monthly unique figure. I dug a bit more and found the stats I was looking for: Monthly unique visitors. Backtracking over the past year I found the number to be consistent since I switched my stats analyzer from webalizer to urchin. I had been told urchin, with the appropriate added features and plug-ins, would provide a better, more accurate look at my visitors, their referrals, the search engines, keywords, browsers and what-not.
I’ve grown my website out of a passion. A passion to help support women during a tough time. A passion to help the next generation of women. A passion to educate. A passion to nudge the medical community to find better diagnostic tools and better alternatives for women’s health issues.
And along the way, years later, I’ve discovered my passion has led to a value and I’m rich according to this article.
I’m richer still because of the experience of taking an idea, growing it and waking up each morning to the excitement of the community of support. That is the real value.
by Kathy of HysterSisters
are you saying that for the majority of sites out there that get decent traffic that they on an average will be able to pull in 38 dollars per unique vistior to their forum? This seems kind of high to me. Right now in the month of December I have 18,000 unique hits on my website. According to you my site is worth 700,000 plus dollars? Is there something else that is used to determine the actual sale price or am I just totally missing the whole deal here?
Brent,
I think the value indicator is also quite high. This is just an interesting observation viewing how some place value on a large forum / community. I personally like to stick to value determined by 1-3 of net income.
Lee
From the article I read the range was from a few dollars to more than a 100.00 per unique visitor per month. This isn’t uniques daily….but the stats that are looking on a monthly unique, totally unique and perhaps length of session (not just a quick click out).
Additional value was placed on registered members. I dunno but I don’t go by just the 1-3 net income because many sites have a hidden value in the content, potential of growth or additional data of visitors/members.