Well, I am not into blog flipping or website flipping yet! (Blog flipping refers to the business of acquiring old blogs or building a brand-new blog and selling it off in a few weeks/months’ time, after building some content, community and traffic). But after reading Mitch’s post earlier this week, I thought of doing some more research into this topic to understand how much my blog might be worth just in case I had to put it on sale some day!
couple of weeks ago when Bankaholic.com, a PR5 WordPress blog, was bought out by BankRate for a whopping $15 million!. Once I overcome the shock, I was really wondering how they arrived at that price tag and using what formula.
Blog Appraisal Parameters
There are a number of things that one needs to consider to appraise a website or blog. If you recall, domain name appraisal and auctioning was one of the hottest businesses prior to the Dot Com fall! Well, assessing a website is a lot more than appraising the domain name value. The amount of traffic the site is getting, the number of regular readers and their participation (number of comments per post etc), income (ads + services) generated, backlinks to the site, age of the domain and various ranks – all of them together decide the popularity and hence the price of a blog. However, what cannot be realistically measured by any tool – or a human being for that matter – is the content quality or the value of the intellectual property.
Online Tools to calculate the value of your blog
Including what Mitch had mentioned in his post, I Googled out five tools that can be used to assess your blog’s worth! All of them use different methodologies and hence the output vary drastically as well! One of the tools appraised D$ at only $550 where as another quoted a whopping $349K! Unfortunately I could not yell out ‘SOLD!’ at the tool! 
Here are the links to the tools:
DNScoop
Website Outlook
My Blog Value
Business Opportunities’ tool based on Technorati API
The ZOHO sheet
DNScoop
Website Outlook
My Blog Value
Business Opportunities’ tool based on Technorati API
The ZOHO sheet
DNScoop, Website Outlook and Business Opportunities’ methods just accept your blog URL and comes up with a number at the end where as the other two methods need more inputs. MyBlogValue seemed to take us through a number of logical steps but at the end came up with a ridiculously high number! Zoho’s sheet on the other hand is only ad income oriented appraisal.
And now, all of you could try out these tools and let me know how much your blog is worth!. For that matter, will you ever sell your blog if you get a good price?
