How much should I pay for a website community?

April 27, 2004 2:29 PM

Website costing. How much should I pay for a website community? [More Inside]

I'm thinking of buying a website community, and have been asked to make an offer. It's a Gardening community serving 100,000 pages a quarter. (50,000 sessions). I'm curious as to how much people on Metafilter would think this community was worth. My rough and ready calculations for advertising revenue is that the site will net about $1,000 a quarter. (Based on the fact that my site which gets 100 visitors a day and has a revenue of about $400 a year) However, I've no idea what sort of bandwidth this sort of site would use, how much time I'd have to spend on it, and what any of the other costs may be.

posted by seanyboy to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You should be able to get a lot of that information regarding bandwidth and hosting costs and the current gross revenue it's bringing in, from the current owner.

Also 100,000 pages every 3 months? That's not much traffic. Have you thought about either building it yourself? Or paying someone to build it for you?
posted by bshort at 2:35 PM on April 27, 2004

I wouldn't think it improper to ask what the per month bandwidth usage is. You can then shop the number around to web hosts to find out what the overhead is likely to be. Obviously you'll want it to be less than the revenue.
posted by o2b at 2:43 PM on April 27, 2004

Also, check to see if the site is missing out on any revenue opportunites -- if they don't have Amazon affiliate links, are they appropriate? If they don't have Google's ads, are they appropriate? You could save on hosting by finding a partner, or by signing up with a host that offers an affiliate program0 and thus commissions on referrals.
posted by o2b at 2:45 PM on April 27, 2004

Currently the site is bringing in no revenue (they say they can't be bothered with it). However I plan on creating revenue from it.

Bandwidth is a tricky subject really, because I plan on stripping the code down. I suppose 1Gig per month bandwidth is initially reasonable, and that's pretty much covered by my current hosting plan. Say - $500 a year for bandwidth.

I understand its not that much traffic, but I see it as an easy way of increasing the number of people that come to my current site without the whole advertising and growing thing). They also have 200 articles and get about 50 user postings per week, so the content & The user membership is already there. (This is what I want to be spending my money on)
posted by seanyboy at 2:54 PM on April 27, 2004

Why buy a site that gets less than 20K visits a month? Seriously. Not to be snarky, but that's a pretty slow site. I suspect you could start your own and get much more than that with a little know-how and patience.

But, running the numbers, I would guess the site would make about $100-200 per month in ads. The large number of topical articles helps a lot, and that's sure to grow over time as more articles and users get integrated. If it was me I'd charge you $10,000 for it. But that assumes a lot. What I'd be charging for is the database + the backend coding + the user base + content. If it has no database or backend it's worth much much less.

The bandwidth will vary depending on how many pictures you use, but I can't imagine it would exceed the bandwidth that comes with most hosting packages. So bandwidth may be free after paying hosting.

Assuming everything is in a database rather than 200+ html files, you shouldn't be talking too much time to maintain it. The trick is automation. If you have an automated process for getting new content into the site it shouldn't take more than a few hours a week to keep up. But if you have to build that automation it could takes weeks of coding.
posted by y6y6y6 at 4:13 PM on April 27, 2004

If it's going to be a business, then do a spreadsheet with the projected expenses. Factor in your time. Make it a high estimate. The best community websites have a very active proprietor, like this one. Estimate revenue.

It's really hard to value websites. It's still a very rapidly changing territory. I'd probably make it a very low bid.
posted by theora55 at 7:05 PM on April 27, 2004

Thankyou everybody for the help. Special Thanks go to o2b, for his behind-the-scenes work on this. And y6y6y6: Remarkably useful.
Thanks.
posted by seanyboy at 8:53 AM on April 28, 2004