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.
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