During the past few days and weeks I've been receiving various offers to sell my aqua-fish.net. Basically the people wanted to buy the domain and the content, and I had to reject their offers to sell my biggest website. Since it's very interesting topic for many webmasters, the decision was made and I wrote this.
How much is a website worth?
The offers I received were different; One buyer offered me 8-12 monthly revenues, another one was willing to spend even 20 monthly revenues and one offered me the amount I'd earn in 30 months. This was the highest offer. But not enough for one site at all. In order to tell how much is a website worth, it is necessary to understand these aspects:
- How long is a website online. Consider that you're a webmaster who does moderation, content writing, updates, coding for over 4 years. 4 years is 48 months. You also paid for the domain, for the hosting service (I'm renting a dedicated server, so it's not cheap!) and eventually you paid people for some services; Usually it is not possible to build a big website without help from other person or persons. That's what I did too and I've spent over $20000 just for content.
- What is your website's further potential? The potential is meant as further growth. The growth can be achieved in various ways, but the easiest is translating the existing content into at least 2 other languages. Spanish, German, Italian... and many more! If you have a reasonable budget, this can be done easily and you'll earn. You'll keep earning without adding new content. Potential can be using more monetisation techniques too. Selling links (even though I don't like it too much) is a perfect way of increasing income without spending a penny on new content.
If you take your website really seriously, then you know that selling an old website for something like 8 or 30 monthly revenues doesn't make any sense.
Don't be an idiot!
Buyers are interested in websites that make money, that are ranked well and that are no shit. I own more websites, but none is as popular as aqua-fish.net and naturally I haven't been receiving offers to sell them. Nevertheless they're earning money and are receiving organic traffic; just less.
Don't be an idiot! Another point of view
Once your website is popular enough, count 2 and 2 and don't be fooled by acquisition offers. Can't you wait 8 months? If you're earning say $100 per month with one website and if you're willing to sell it for $800, then:
- You're an idiot,
- You're doing something illegal with the site and you want to get rid of it as soon as possible.
If you're the first option, then
contact me immediately and I'll buy your website :) .
22 January 2010