

Ask HN: How much is a utility website worth? - yuvadam

A friend of mine (for real :)) received an offer to buy a website he owns and he's a bit lost as to the valuation of the deal.<p>The site is a certain utility application in use by users all over the world. The service is free, the site requires minimum maintenance, and the sole source of income is AdSense.<p>100% of incoming traffic is organic, and the site is ranked 4th on Google for the site's keywords.<p>Raw data:
- 6K daily absolute unique visitors
- 110K monthly absolute unique visitors
- $1200 monthly revenue (AdSense)
- Google PR 6<p>Any thoughts on how he should approach this proposition? How this deal should be valuated?
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sagacity
To the best of my knowledge, the going rates (at Flippa etc.) for sites
generating revenue solely via AdSense are anywhere from 10X to 15X monthly
revenues.

Also, in general, the more the age of the site and the longer the
traffic/revenue history, the more comfortable the buyers are; even willing to
pay higher monthly revenue multiples on long track records.

Furthermore, all this (what I mentioned above) is usually for _content_ sites.
Since your friend has a utility app, it _could_ fetch more value.

I'm assuming all traffic is 100% organic. At valuations like this, I guess the
potential buyers will perform a _lot_ of due diligence on traffic sources,
quality (and quantity) of backlinks, proof of traffic history (i.e. logs) and
revenue history (AdSense account screenshots etc.). Be prepared with all this
and then name a price.

All the best, HTH. :-)

Edit: Fixed minor typos

~~~
bmelton
Completely agree with all of it. I personally wouldn't accept less than 12x
monthly revenues for even a content site, but for something as turnkey as
this, they're either betting that they can extend the app or easily increase
traffic to it significantly.

The other consideration is that if this is a PR6, that should fetch a premium
as well -- I don't know how much additional that factors in, but I would try
to ask for at least an additional 25%, and see what happens there.

~~~
viggity
What is PR6?

~~~
profitbaron
PR is Pagerank. Which Google uses for its Algorithms. However, despite what
people tend to believe a PR6 isn't that hard to obtain.

~~~
sagacity
As a matter of fact, the PR (as shown on the Google tool bar) ceased to be
(anywhere near to) an accurate measure of the _real_ pagerank (the actual
algorithmic score, as calculated by Larry and Sergie's formula) of a website's
link popularity _many_ years ago.

If you _do_ have the Google toolbar installed on your browser (probably not,)
you may have noticed sites showing PR 0 (i.e. a white bar) ranking _above_
sites with PR2, 3, 4 or even higher.

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profitbaron
100% of his income off is off Adsense and its pulling in $1200/month? You
should tell him to look at the advertisments which his users are clicking on,
THEN replace the adsense ads with CPA advertisements (of which the users are
clicking on) and make even more than that per month as well as, diversify and
protect income if he gets banned by Adsense.

