What is my website
worth?
Everyone thinks their website
is worth millions, but it is probably not.
If you are paying $10 a month
for hosting and your site has no earnings, the site has very
little value. In fact, the only value is the domain name which
has no value unless someone wants it.
Today, a website is no big
deal to own or run. So there is little value in an existing
website.
As a clear example our company
buys domains and sets up websites to sell. Adding pages, products
and full e-commerce capabilities. Then the websites are offered
for sale for $25 as an easy entry into the online world. Some of
the sites have been for sale for 3 years or more and have had
hundreds of thousands of page views and have reached a PR5+ on
google. Yet, they still sit for sale at only $25.
Since the sites had some value
and traffic we tried adding affiliate products and the sites
started generating an income. One site earned over $1000.00 in
one month, basically on its own with no effort. So we increased
the asking price to $100 since the sites were now generating an
income and we were not anxious to sell them.
Our sites that we bought to
sell have now make us thousands and thousands of dollars sitting
on our servers for sale. But still, they have no value and no
buyers.
So how is the average website
owner going to sell their website?
Today people can build a
website in minutes, so they are unwilling to pay for somone elses
headache or problems.
In most cases, people expect
to buy a website for $25 and it will earn several hundred dollars
a month in free income. But any website owner knows better. It
just wont do anything without some effort.
If a website is earning money,
then it has value like any other business, but buyers wont pay
what it is worth they want an ebay style bargain. This is
crippling the market and making it impossible to get any serious
money for real websites.
To make the market worse, you
look in classifieds and people want $100,000.00 for a website
that looks like it took an hour to build and has no traffic. That
makes every website offered for sale a joke. You can't guage
value by asking price, so the website that is worth $100,000.00
is viewed the same as the $10 overpriced website.
There is really no website
resale market to speak of. The over abundance of websites
for sale and the lack of value
makes selling anything almost impossible.
There are websites on the high
end that do have value. Value can be based on heavy traffic, and
I do mean heavy, over 500,000 visitors a day. Value can be based
on proprietary technology or programing like ebay or paypal
systems.
Sites like youtube have such
technology and was purchased by google to sell the technology to
other businesses. If you have developed a website that has
programing that no other website has, real technology not just a
concept, and heavy traffic, then the site has value. And it is
likely very significant.
But if you are on a shared
hosting server with low traffic and none of your own technology,
you will be lucky to get a few hundred dollars out of any web
property.
If the website can be
developed for less money than the asking price, nobody will pay
it.
It seems that the only sale
will be if the site is less than 1/3 of the cost of developing.
But with companies cloning sites and selling then on ebay for $19.95,
its not likely someone will pay thousands for unique programing
on their website.
There are just too many out of
the box options for people and the market just is not there.
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