I have already read about it, so I know the basics. but I would like to hear if some of the posters have first hand experience of selling their small websites? How did you make up the asking price and did you get it???

Or for a practical run, how much is the value of Sciforums for a business person who actually wants to profit from running it??

While I haven't actually sold a small website per se, I would guess that the price is directly proportional to the number of hits per day, week, month, etc.

If you're talking about a blog-type website, I would check out:
http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/
Cool little app that computes how much your blog is worth based on hits (I'm assuming). But he does list some links on his site you might find useful.

http://www.glurk.com/

Your site is valued at: $62
http://www.cwire.org/website-value-calculator/

:bawl:

sciforums.com
$8,758

on another site it was 100,000$ or something.

dnscoop.com

oh...my price went up for some reason.

The estimated value of http://www.spuriousmonkey.com is: $5,900

used to be 2,000$ with that site.

Must be the 2 extra unique visitors.

I have already read about it, so I know the basics. but I would like to hear if some of the posters have first hand experience of selling their small websites? How did you make up the asking price and did you get it???

Or for a practical run, how much is the value of Sciforums for a business person who actually wants to profit from running it??

Web sites are worth nothing, that's the hilarious part.

Create a new one, and market it, for far less than it costs to buy an established site. Steal the market. This happens all the time, Facebook now being worth allegedly billions, by treading over the same tired old ground of social networking.

I don't see why any company would buy an existing web site, as in reality there are few intellectual property issues.

I guess some think that they get a head start with having the name.

But your logic seems sensible.

Web sites are worth nothing, that's the hilarious part.
Create a new one, and market it, for far less than it costs to buy an established site. Steal the market.

I agree. But that is business, people see opportunities differently. For a content site the valuation is 5-6 times annual profits, but for that price it is much cheaper just to start from scratch, specially in case of Sciforums, where the content is not even provided by the website's owner.

That's why I was curious about real life experiences and not just theoretical valuation....

P.S.:Web sites are worth nothing,

Tell that to Mark Cuban, who sold broadcast.com for 6 BILLION to Yahoo. Today it does worth zero though... :)

I guess some think that they get a head start with having the name.

They do, but that goes only for so long. I used to use Yahoo, but when Google came, I switched. Thus if the new site has better features,value,speed, people will switch and the headstart will disappear....

They do, but that goes only for so long. I used to use Yahoo, but when Google came, I switched. Thus if the new site has better features,value,speed, people will switch and the headstart will disappear....

I did the same thing, and I agree but I think SpuriousMonkey was saying that, for instance, if you want to sell specialty socks on the internet, it helps to have the domain socks.com.

IP.S.:

Tell that to Mark Cuban, who sold broadcast.com for 6 BILLION to Yahoo. Today it does worth zero though... :)


Ah, the good old dot com boom. I worked for an ISP at the time, some of my colleagues were paper millionaires in stock options, having worked for companies that the ISP acquired (with the banks money) for a long time, and having been given options based on length of service (carried over).

Problem was they couldn't realise the cash fast enough, and lo! The dot com boom, bust, and the stock became horribly devalued, and the option a joke. Not a funny joke, either. I got bought out of my options for something like 600 times what they were worth, when we transferred companies. And no, that didn't make me rich! (the company got booted off NASDAQ if that's a clue)

But $6Bn for a website is beyond the pale, it really is. Whoever signed that 'deal' at Yahoo, was a simpleton, and just didnt understand the emerging field. Cuban clearly did, it's why he sold!

I agree Phlogi, and if I had a website and somebody would offer 4-5 times annual profits, I would sell immediatelly. Facebook's evaluation is pretty ridiculous too.
But again, here we are talking about smaller, less known websites. I guess the question for the buyer is: Do I want to pay a premium for the data/costumerbase and being known or would I rather just start from scratch?

Also, if the buyer thinks that he could find much better way to get ads money, a premium can be justified, because time is money and others might be already copying the idea of the site....

P.S.: Some IT companies survived the bubble. There is a masseur who just cashed out her Google options and now she has her own masseur. :)