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On the Money
: Website Revenue Strategies BlogDetermining the TRUE Value of a Web Site
Today we published the article What Is Your Web Site Worth? on SitePoint, written by our own Georgina Laidlaw.
While it’s targeted at site owners who may be looking to sell their web sites, it’s equally as useful for buyers who are in the market to make a purchase, but have yet to gain experience in determining the true value of a web site.
SitePoint set out to find something approaching a clear answer on site valuation. We asked several experts — people who have, for years, made their livings online, and have first-hand experience buying and selling web properties of various types — for their insights into the web property market, and for tips and advice on valuing sites.
The article is well researched and not only includes expert advice gleaned from interviews with many successful online entrepreneurs (including many names that you may recognize from around the SitePoint Forums), but also includes graphs based on statistics from the SitePoint Marketplace. In fact, as far as I’m aware, it’s the most comprehensive collection of advice available on the topic.
So if you’ve been monitoring the marketplace and are thinking about diving in (either as a buyer or as a seller) …
Marketplace Madness: Two Categories Now FREE!
We’ve just started a 60 day trial period with offering two of our categories completely free of charge. The Trade Your Services and Want to Buy categories can now be listed in at no cost, except for any optional upgrades you may choose to apply.
The limitation is that listings placed in these categories will only be visible on the front page if the “Listing featured on front page” upgrade is applied. Listings will always be displayed within the category page as usual.
Enjoy the freebies!
Google Adsense Trialed on Yahoo!
Yahoo! is currently running a two week trial of Google’s Adsense on 3% of its US search results. The trial is seen as an investigation into the prospects of a long term partnership between the two companies. The core idea, (according to Yahoo!) is to exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, but is it really?
Or is this just game playing with Microsoft? Perhaps to boost perceived company value or to allude at the creation of an advertising monopoly with Google. What ever the aim — Microsoft’s General Councel, Brad Smith has responded by posting this comment:
Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.
Interestingly — Microsoft are complaining about the market becoming less competitive. Surely that’s a case of the pot calling the …
The Web’s $100 Million Secret Economy
In a market that’s set to top $100 million in 2008, the SitePoint Marketplace has been independently ranked the #1 source for buying and selling web real estate.
Jon Wheatley has begun producing monthly stats on the average prices of sites sold on some of the more active online marketplaces:
I had a script developed that crawls the content of some of the most active website marketplaces and grabs the sale price of each web property sold. I then took that information and created some average figures.
Wheatley compared web site marketplaces in terms of their average listing prices and overall dollar volumes, with the SitePoint Marketplace ranking 900% higher than its closest competitor.
The analysis showed that sitepoint.com had a total of $3,911,992 worth of listings between 495 individual auctions during the month of February, with an average listing price of $7903 per auction, compared to $805.73 for the next closest competitor. In fact, the SitePoint Marketplace’s listing prices totalled $3.9 million for February alone – more than all the other competitors combined.
If you haven’t started dabbling in online real estate, there’s never been a better time to do some reading and get your toes wet.
1 in 5 Typo Domains Funded By Google
McAfee’s new report on typosquatting details how 1 in 5 typo-squatted domain names is being funded by Google AdSense.
For their report, McAfee studied 1.9 million typographical variations of 2,771 of the most popular and well known Web sites. Of these, nearly 7% were suspected typo-squatters, defined as domain names registered for the sole purpose of generating advertising revenue from people who mistyped URLs.
The five most highly squatted categories are game sites (14.0%), airlines (11.4%), main stream media company sites (10.8%), adult sites (10.2%) and technology and Web 2.0 related sites (9.6%).
Besides the scale of the problem and its effect on legitimate business, what disgusts me the most is that Google AdWords have no way to opt out of having their advertising displayed on parked domain names.
Addendum: While there are legal routes for trademark owners to recover domain names that are owned by typosquatters, the process is long and expensive. Typosquatting would a much smaller industry if AdSense and other networks took a strong stance against the practice and stopped making it so lucrative.
Google And Paypal To Pay You For Xmas Shopping
Google and Paypal are waging a war this Xmas to convince online shoppers to use their system for paying for online purchases:
This year, Google is offering two frequent-flier miles on any of seven airlines (all the majors except American) for every $1 spent. It also offers $5 to $50 discounts, with minimum purchase, at several dozen merchants … PayPal has fewer merchants but its offer is more lucrative for shoppers in some ways, with 20 percent of purchases credited to the buyer’s PayPal account.
Are incentives like these going to convince you to try one system over the other? And what incentives are you offering visitors to your sites this holiday season?
Jeanne Jennings Speaking at ClickZ Email Marketing Conference
Jeanne Jennings, email marketing guru and author of SitePoint’s The Email Marketing Kit, will be speaking at ClickZ’s event, ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing, next Tuesday October 2nd at the Hilton in New York City.
“ClickZ Specifics: E-mail Marketing” is an intensive, one-day event designed to educate, inspire, and instill confidence in anyone using e-mail to communicate with their customers and prospects.
If you’re looking to get to grips with email marketing, grab yourself a ticket today!
How to Boost Your Ad Revenue 70-110%, Automatically!
Did you know Google AdSense allows for 9 billion different layout/size/color combinations of its ad units? Do you know which one is the best for your site, or for that matter, which ad network will make you the most money at any point during the day?
PubMatic, a new service that just launched in “Alpha Mode”, will help you answer those questions by dynamically optimizing the ad space on your site.
Currently they work with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, ValueClick, and Komli — and they are planning on adding additional ad networks in the future.
As part of the Alpha launch, they are looking to recruit 100 innnovative publishers. If they can replicate their early results, this could be boon to publishers everywhere who continually struggle to find and optimize their ad inventory across multiple networks.
Can forums still make money?
It appears that larger advertisers (the ones that pay) are asking ad networks to block forums from showing their ads. The larger the advertiser is, the more controlled they want the content to be. Just a few days ago I received an email blast from Tribal Fusion:
I wanted to reach out to you because we have begun to see more frequent requests from advertisers to block forums from their campaigns. These are usually premium advertisers with large advertising budgets that need assurances that their ad will run only on appropriate content. Since even moderated forums are difficult to police, they will most likely ask us to block forums from their campaigns. In the past we could not offer this functionality, but due to popular demand, as of August 15 we will be able to offer this option by request.
So can you still make money off of forums? The answer is yes. Now, personally I would never start a forum simply to make money because it will quickly become obvious to the end users and they will not stick around long. But, if you would like to at least cover cost here are some things that can still help pay the …
Is Selling Text Links Dangerous?
There’s no doubt that selling text links is big business, but is is a risky business? The question, is selling text links dangerous, pops up in web master forums with increasing frequency. For me, two questions really come to mind:
1. Will selling text links hurt my site?
I don’t think there is anything wrong with selling (or buying) text links. But my opinion doesn’t matter. The fact is, buying and selling text links could potentially hurt your site. From Google’s webmaster guidelines:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”.
Pretty obvious how that fits. Further, Matt Cutts from Google says:
But for everyone else, let me talk about why we consider it outside our guidelines to get PageRank via buying links. Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.
But can’t search engines detect paid links?
Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and …
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