How much is your website?

Do you know what your website is worth? The short answer: Multiply the number of unique monthly visitors to the site of $ 38. That is, if one calculates the average of 1000 visitors per month, your site is worth $ 38 000, if you average 100,000 unique visitors per month, your site is worth $ 3.8 million.

Consider some of these purchases in the last year:

Dow Jones purchases MarketWatch for $ 519 million
Online purchases Weblogs Inc to America for $ 25 million
News Corp. buying MySpace for $ 580 million
InterActiveCorp purchases Ask Jeeves for 1.9 billion

In an article titled "What Works", the December issue of the magazine Business 2.0 looks at recent sales of web sites and analyze the website traffic 'to reach a value per visitor per month. The figure came up with is $ 38 per unique visitor per month.

What does this mean? For high traffic websites, bubble-era buyouts are back. If you have a website with high traffic you can potentially sell and get rich. Now, the previous example of a website that generates 1000 visitors per month is just that, an example, nobody is interested to 1000 visitors. But, if you have 100,000 visitors per month and you can be up to something. High traffic is money's worth in advertising revenues. Internet ad spending will reach $ 12 billion by the end of this year.

The article states that venture capitalists look at three metrics when evaluating an internet company:

1. The cost of registering new users to the site
2. The stickiness of the site (the frequency of repeat visits)
3. Additional services (such as premium account)

I would go further to say that websites that target a niche audience that is not already saturated by other web sites will be worth more. MySpace.com Take, for example, is targeting the age group 18-35. The top of my head I can think of dozens of websites in direct competition for the same advertising dollars ... FaceBook.com, Friendster.com, ClassMates.com, HotOrNot.com, just to name a few. Yet, MySpace.com sold for $ 580 million. What to do if your site has high traffic, but also attracts a different audience, a demographic that advertisers want to get, but still have the option to do so? How much is that worth?

Furthermore, I would say that the websites that they find a way to convince users to pay for unique services including cash in We've all seen websites that offer free accounts, but require a fee to update the premium accounts. PhotoBucket.com, a photo sharing site, requires a monthly fee for extra bandwidth. Ryze.com, a business networking site, requires a monthly fee just to be able to send other members of the site. But what if your site charges a fee for information only? And, what if the users are more than willing to pay for it? How much is that worth?

So, what is your website? Only time will tell .......