April 20, 2007
How Much Is Your Blog Worth?
Del.icio.us found me this clicky-form applet this morning that ought to be of interest to all sorts of bloggers: How Much Is Your Blog Worth? from Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog.
Carlson's applet queries Technorati for information that it uses to compute a URL's value. Folded into that computation is the estimated value of an inbound link derived from AOL's purchase price of Weblogs, Inc.
As all thirty or so of my regular readers have noticed by now, I have taken a new interest in finding ways to get at least some money out of As I Please. So estimators of the worth of my blog are of more than academic interest to me.
So of course I pasted my URL into the box and clicked on the button. The number that came out surprised me: When I convert the lump sum it represents into a cash flow with the same present value, the number I get is in the middle of the ballpark I estimate for the Google AdSense revenue I expect based on a very few day's results and my current traffic figures.
In other words, Carlson's estimator for blog value may be a good one.
Posted by abostick at April 20, 2007 02:38 PMThere is no way my blog is worth $3,951.78.
My theory is that it only has value because my wife, who is much more popular than I am, occasionally mentions me on LiveJournal.
The algorithm seems to be a brain-dead simple one: (Number of blogs that have linked to yours in the past six months) x $564.54.
That might seem ridiculous at first. But you probably aren't aware of the amount of traffic your LJ gets by way of search. The volume of search traffic a page gets depends on many things, including PageRank or equivalent, and PageRank in turn depends in ways that Google now keeps mysterious on the number of inbound links to the page. The majority of visits to your LJ are very likely the result of search queries.
The big hindrance to taking advantage of the worth of your LJ is that it is hosted on LiveJournal. The LJ TOS forbids "banner ads," but doesn't say anything about the sponsored-text-link format of Google AdSense. Nevertheless, I expect that Six Apart would take a dim view of users putting even text ads in their LJs.
But if your blog was on, say, Blogspot, that $4,000 valuation doesn't sound unreasonable to me. That's the lump-sum equivalent of a cash flow of 55 cents per day, or about $16/month in ad revenues (using a discount rate of 5%/year).
Posted by: Alan Bostick at April 20, 2007 07:30 PMMind you, I've been learning about blog monetization only for the past month or so, and I've been doing it myself for four whole days. So I'm obviously an expert, just like I was an expert stud player the day after I read Sklansky Malmuth & Zee, the first month I was playing cardroom poker.
Posted by: Alan Bostick at April 20, 2007 07:33 PM
