[Mobius]

I talked to a friend of mine earlier today and we decided to try buying a site owned by a guy who lives in our town here in Italy. This site once used to be the core of activity for all internet-users in my town, but became quite inactive in the past few years. I think there are no new posts on its forum since April 2012. Its web TV met a similar fate, too.

Our problem is: how do we determine how much this site is worth? Are there any ways to do it? We don't feel like we can talk to the owner and say "Hey, how much do you want?". We need an estimated and reliable value in order to start bartering with the owner and convince him to sell the site.

If you consider yourself capable of determining the value and don't want to tell everybody, please send me a PM and I'll give you the details.

[Polpolion]

What exactly are you buying? Are you buying the servers that host the website, buying the domain name, buying the responsibility of maintaining it?

[Black Wolf]

Best way I can think is to think of it as a business. Assuming there were no paid services, then you need to determine the number of views per unit time and calculate its potential ad revenue profit over the foreseeable future, then compare that to the rate of return you want - although that step might be a bit iffy if you're not buying it for profit.

My advice would be to run the numbers through something like this (just googled that, no comment on its accuracy), subtract the estimated running costs (including whatever you think you'll need to spend advertising it back up to its former glory) and then multiply it by an arbitrary length of time (I'd say somewhere around 3 to 5 years would probably be OK).

Of course, this doesn't take into account any assets (including the IP behind the makeup, graphics or structure of the site), any value associated with the goodwill it may have generated (Which may be low anyway, if it's dead, as you say), any assets it may have (like Polpollion says, if you're buying physical servers) or any pleasure/other utility the guy gets out of it. So I'd be tempted to round up by a reasonable amount to cover these sorts of things.

[Mobius]

What exactly are you buying? Are you buying the servers that host the website, buying the domain name, buying the responsibility of maintaining it?

I guess everything except the servers.

My advice would be to run the numbers through something like this (just googled that, no comment on its accuracy), subtract the estimated running costs (including whatever you think you'll need to spend advertising it back up to its former glory) and then multiply it by an arbitrary length of time (I'd say somewhere around 3 to 5 years would probably be OK).

I need an accurate site.

[The E]

Start off with the sites' Alexa ranking. That'll give you a very rough idea of how much traffic the site gets (and, following from that, how much revenue it is likely to produce), but I don't think you'll be able to get accurate counts of the daily/weekly/monthly unique visitors the site attracts (Which is essential for ad revenue) without access to the server.

However, given that you're describing what is essentially a dead site, the costs of running it would have to include marketing the fact that it is now under new management, and re-attracting the old community as well as getting new people on board.

[Mobius]

Ok, now I have the Alexa ranking of that site, what am I supposed to do in order to convert such ranking into a value?

[Mobius]

[Phantom Hoover]

you seem very confused, and very convicted about your confusion

you're not going to get any meaningful estimate of the site's 'value' from the alexa ranking (now advertising revenues would be a start, if it has any). just talk to the ****ing owner rather than repeatedly asking us this meaningless question