I kind of question TEN years of gross revenues as a valuation. But, if you're interested in buying Bright Trading, please let me know, we can certainly use that as a valuation number, LOL. And to think we thought Schwab paid too much for CyberTrader (they did, $400Million or so) but nothing like 10 years of gross revenues, LOL. All the best, Don
Correct. For content sites they usually use 5-6 years. Here is a much better evaluation site, glurk.com. After putting in as much info as I could and guessing a 15K monthly income: elitetrader.com Domain Length:11 Word Count:2 Registered Trademark:Yes Google Page Rank:4 Alexa Traffic Rank:19,000 Incoming Links:371 Monthly Uniques:50000 Monthly Pages:100000 Age:10 yrs Listed in Yahoo Directory:YesTop 10 Search Results:Yes Monthly Income:$15,000 Sources of Income:1 Competitors:<5 Based on the these values and a carefully calibrated equation, we think that your website is worth: $1,352,400
Don, stocktrades.com went for about 25,000 (minus commissions) Are you sure you were "offered way over" a million dollars? Or is this a little stretch of the truth.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PQ8e4972lE
Good analysis. The only thing that matters for a place like this... Is traffic... and ad-clicks generated by that traffic. The business model here is to maximize traffic at any cost... Totally irregardless of quality. Assuming your traffic stats are OK... I would put the monthly income higher at 25-30K... But penalize ET for "low quality" traffic... At least 20% of it from the developing world... which really doesn't count... And a lot of just plain unsophisticated traffic. So lower traffic/clicks... But higher monthly income... It's a wash: Estimated value: $1,500,000 and zero upside And that's after 10 years... the #1 site by far. Making money off web traffic is harder than it seems. My little trading business is worth 2 or 3 times ET... With 10 times the upside.
When was the last time you saw a billboard ad and went straight to the store to purchase the item? Banner ads are "top of the mind" advertising as much as interactive advertising. Whether you like it or not, you r mind subliminally factors in the information in the ad.
Now here is a comment from a man obviously blessed with brains Its the people with interesting things to say which make a website such as this prosper. The advertisers wouldn't be here if it was boring. So obvious yet not realized by hardly any websites. The owner of Elite might be well advised to contact and encourage the cream of the posters if he wants this site to be worth anything.
Well, when considering pricing a website, I would also determine the cost of replacement/starting new. Let's say the software itself can be had for 50K and the annual server fees is 5K (someone correct me if I am way out of the ballpark), thus the platform can be run on relative very cheap, compared to the asking price of 1.5-2 million. Let's not forget that ET is basicly just a platform provider and all the content comes from the posters! So if a buyer decides just to copy the idea and come up with a similar platform, he only has to magnet content providers, which is us, posters. Once there are a few dozens quality posters, and a little time to get the word out, the traffic will come.... It might take 2 years and a little advertisement, but starting new can be a much cheaper choice/better return on initial investment....