How to price a website?

Since there is no industry standard for pricing a website, a site is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. This isn’t helpful if you’re considering selling your site and don’t know where to begin. In my opinion, a website should be priced as one would a brick-and-mortar business.

One might price a site by taking its annual profit and multiplying by some factor, say 2.5, to arrive at a “fair” value. Unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, the internet business is volatile and everchanging, so a profit one year may not translate to one in the next.

Other considerations for valuing a site include the site’s niche, market reach, traffic, search engine rankings, age of domain name, number of inbound links, number of paying sponsors, Google PageRank, Alexa rankings, number of competing sites, and so on.

dnScoop has an interesting site valuation tool that attempts to value a site based on various factors. However, one should be forwarned that the results, while useful and interesting, should be regarded for its entertainment value rather than taken seriously for valuing a site.

Perhaps a better way to get an idea of how much your site is worth is to hang out in forums like the Digitalpoint and Sitepoint marketplaces and see how much sites comparable to yours are selling for. Ebay is another place to search for past sales of websites.