Help with valuation

[WestHamFan]

I've got a shot at a domain but struggling to formulate a price offer.

It's a lousy domain name (7 letter .com but not dictionary) but it is currently an very active website and has an Alexa of just over 49000. It's got a Google PR4 so I'm assuming traffic must be pretty useful. It currently carries a lot of auction flavoured traffic so ranks pretty well in that field. And as I have an eBay affiliateship..... you get the drift.

What kind of ball park value do the experienced domainers here place on those traffic indicator numbers despite the 'so so' name?

Any help and guidance appreciated.

 

[ScottJ]

You still need traffic stats before you can make a sound offer.

Either that or you would have to have a VERY similar based site so that you could try and correlate Alexa data based on that, by itself it means nothing.

Also Alexa numbers can be faked etc so some due diligence and research needed, make a low offer on the understanding that if they can supply good stats on traffic & referral data that could have a significant bearing and let you come back with an improved offer if they would be interested in selling.

Or if its listed for sale just ask for real traffic & referer stats

 

[WestHamFan]

Hi and thank you for your response so far.

I've only been given the stats for August 2007 but have asked for the past 6 months to check this is typical:

So the webalizer stats for August 07 were:

Total Hits 1337797
Total Files 807564
Total Pages 338282
Total Visits 106447

My eyes are on the visits stat obviously. So assuming these are confirmed as typical monthly numbers where do I start?

I don't want to have the phone slammed down on me for making an insulting offer but......

 

[ScottJ]

Webaliser is pretty poor and doesn't really pin down the specifics that well, I would suggest that you ask them to add Google Analaytics for a few days which they can do and give you email access to or Xtreme tracking http://extremetracking.com/ and give you some real numbers.

Not sure but I think that the orange 'sites' numbers are more like unique visitors from webaliser and 'visits' isn't really that accurate.

This may seem labourous but if your spending money they should go the extra mile to ensure you get the real data.

 

[IanTurner]

There are many ways of fixing stats packages.

So beware -

- on the other hand an Alexa rank of 49,000 (although possibly manipulated) indicates some decent traffic.

 

[WestHamFan]

Many thanks for the sound advice. I like the Google analytics idea.

It is a membership site (not automatic approval of members) with just short of a thousand members which is encouraging. So - while I understand the risk of manipulation - the combo of Alexa, Google PR, membership etc. is looking attractive. But my problem remains... I still have to make the opening offer as the owner wont commit

I may float £600 ($1200) on the condition we explore stats a little more and see what the result is. If I get a bad response to that then I probably know it's going to cost more than I want to pay! If we're still talking after that then I know there may be a deal within the reach of my budget.

Really appreciate your time and thoughts guys... thank you.