A Path to Success

Bell Entertainment Letter

BellOfferLetterJan2010

Get Bell Entertainment, if you can. It rocks!

Useful tools for Small Business - CTV interview with MikeMcDerment from Freshbooks

A great interview with Freshbooks CEO Mike McDerment on 3 great tools for small business. Freshbooks, Paypal and Shoeboxed.

http://watch.ctv.ca/clip252996#clip252996

The true market value of a blog - proven on ebay

Over the past 6 years, since July 2003 to be exact, a popular blog on the PVR (personal video recorder) market - www.pvrblog.com -  informed the enthusiast community about the evolution of devices like TiVO. These PVRs or DVRs (digital video recorders) are common place from any telecom or cable TV provider.

The owner of the site has put up and sold the site on eBay for $12,110. This is a fascinating, transparent transaction because the owner decided to put up the real world statistics on the performance of the site. From that we can do some math to determine a true market value of a blog like PVRblog.com, intellectual property built up over time.

• 1,536 originally written posts and 11,144 moderated (non-spam) comments
• 9,455,546 Lifetime Pageviews
• 4,024 Average Pageviews/Day over 6 years, currently average is about 600 per day (nothing posted since August 2009)
• 180,013 subscribers to the RSS feed

• Generated advertising income of $3,000 per month in advertising revenue, now it gets much less - $150/month - a 20x decrease!
• Cost about $15/month to run + tons and tons of time on behalf of the moderator. Roughly almost $1000 was spent to maintain the site. So the return was 12x if you don't consider the time or the advertising revenue.
• Estimate that roughly 1 year was peak ad year = $36,000 in revenue + $10,000 of revenue in the remaining years = $46,000 in ad revenue over 6 years. With the ebay sale the total return was 58,000 roughly on a $1,000 investment. That's a 58x return in 6 years. Better than the stock market! And more educational.

The value of a page view: .001 cents per page view over 6 years (12,110/9,455,546)

The value of an RSS subscriber: .05c (12110/180103)

The value of a comment: $1.08 (12110/11144)

The value of a post: $7.88 (12110/1536)

Another way to think of this is what would it take for a blog to be worth $1M?

X page views x .001c/pageview = $1,000,000

X = 1,000,000 / .001

X = 1,000,000,000 page views = 1 Billion page views total for a valuation of $1M. That's 100M page views per year for 10 years straight. Do you think most websites are overvalued? I do.

Mind you you can probably get to 200M page views and still do ok, the value per page view probably increases as the site grows, but regardless. That's the benchmark value of any smallish blog site. And as the site traffic grows, I would bet that each of these values increases rather than decreases due to market effects. It would be interesting to see other blogs that have been sold on ebay for comparisons. Do you know one? Put your findings in the comments below.

What tribal stage are you in?

I'm at Stage 3 "I'm great" with a bit of Stage 2 "My life sucks". I want to be at Stage 4, "We're great" -- all the time. And of course Stage 5 "Life is great" is the ideal.

City of Craft Needs Volunteers

City of Craft 2009 needs some volunteers for their holiday sale. This is not a not for profit organization, but they are friends of NewPath. Here's a call for volunteers on their website.

Handmade homesteader, or lonestar craft cowboy, you’re on call to join us on the radical-craft

frontier to build this City!

City of Craft is an innovative, craft culture event that features craft-based installations, free workshops, outreach by community arts groups and a curated craft fair of modern handmade goods. Hitch your wagon to this shooting star and volunteer with City of Craft 2009!

Fear not, folks… this is no one-horse town!  Put your hands on one of many plum roles:

All Around Town Heroes- for vendor support and random acts of craft-kindness in the welcome department

Barn-raisers and barn-burners- to put it all up and tear it all down

Sassy School Marms- to help out with our Craft Lab and spread the education word

Décor Do-gooders- to make the place real pretty (December 4 Décor Party)

Rangers- to spread the word to the outside world

Sheriff- strong-armed lovers to keep the peace and move tables

Camp out with us for a weekend, create happy trails, and meet amazin’ crafty-folks! 

For more information and detailed descriptions of volunteer roles, email Day at volunteer@cityofcraft.com

December 12 & 13 at the Great Hall 

Shifts available throughout the event (9am-6pm Saturday, 11am to 7pm Sunday)

CITY OF CRAFT

A celebration of all things crafty in Toronto