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.