Valuing / selling a high traffic website

[mojoco]

I'm toying with the idea of selling a site but could use a little help with the valuation.

I have a .co.uk website with over 15k pages indexed in Google.

Circa 400,000 unique visitors annually, traffic is predominantly organic.

4200 backlinks from 620 referring domains according to Moz.com

There is some ad revenue with plenty of scope for improvement.

If you can help with a valuation, please send me a PM.

I'd be extremely grateful for any assistance.

Many thanks.

 

[Admin]

A typical formula for that type of site is 3 years revenue which is presumably more or less equal to profit. So if the ad revenue was like £5k a year, valuation is £15k. Of course, there are factors which should be taken into account which can shift this in either direction

Source: I buy and sell websites...

 

[Sound]

trends also play a big part in valuations difference between old and new like dvdhire and streaming

 

[Grant]

Age, quality of links, content, trajectory, chance of the industry dipping and so on taken into account, usually listed around 33-35x monthly net via brokers, and expect to pay them 10-15%.

I have experience selling with Empire Flippers, so happy to shed light in that respect.

 

[Ryan Ewen]

I would be valuing on pages in google and positions.

400k impressions @ £300 per 100k is not great for resale.

Content has a value - depending on quality even if just to migrate content and 301 the site to a new home

 

[Grant]

Where'd you see the £3 RPM Robert? Agree that isn't good for resale.

All I can say is I tried to sell a site based on potential, content, pages, links, but low revenue, didn't work out (I'm looking for those exact sites now ironically).

Brokers and 90% of buyers work off revenue, and the value they think they can add. And that usually works out to about 34x if it's a good site. Can get more if there are industry players wanting to grab up every bit of market share and it's big enough.

If it's a good site. Just keep it.

 

[Ryan Ewen]

I've sold a few sites to media companies where £3k-£4k ad revenue per million views seems to be where the advertising market is for UK/US traffic.

So working backwards i would estimate your traffic value at £1200 per year.

I have a lot of sites so value based on seo or content personally.

For content or seo i would not quote moz personally - either Majestic or Ahrefs.

If you want to share a url i can offer more specific thoughts.

 

[Ryan Ewen]

carspring dot co dot uk sold at DL for around £7k. That is now a 301 redirect. If it had been rebuilt - i would have sold it for 6 figures to a competitor.

However as a 301 it is probably generating way in excess of that in traffic/seo

 

[Grant]

Agreed there. Especially in smaller sites where people are looking for something to grow, if the SEO/content isn't there and it's minimal rev, might as well just start a fresh one.

 

[Breakline]

Can you please send me the link in PM? I would like to make an offer.

 

[JMI]

I don't get why there's not more value in sites that rank well considering how much time and effort it takes to get even a "decent" rank (anywhere on page 1) let alone top spot - I would have thought the industry would have caught up but does not really value SEO/SERP ranking... presumably its because its seen as somewhat disposable, low barrier to entry and is unpredictable.

 

[JMI]

The time/effort spent to get something is largely irrelevant; it's the main outcome that has the value (IE revenue/profit.)

Same in physical businesses, I guess. Someone spends 15+ years building up a business and then it's still only worth 2-3x yearly profits.

That's not really what I meant. Say I own credible site A and it ranks well in a competitive niche lets say "dog grooming" but made little revenue but does have some traffic, I would expect it to still have value at the very least as credible backlink fodder to juice site B (Mega Pet site) or perhaps it could be made profitable with a redesign, better adsense integration etc. Maybe I'm out of touch and site A is not worth the effort.