How do you value a website?

the model over at flippa.com seems to be a years revenue, though if it has a business backing it possibly 18. again depends on the site, how its run, what its costs and revenue is, how much you can improve (ie further investment needed) , accounts reliability, Income sources, traffic sources etc.

Yeah go have a look at Flippa and some of the sales over there, how people are valuing their own site and how people are actually bidding on other sites.

But as Arfan said, normally its 12-18 months revenue gives you a good guideline of how much a website is worth

From what I have seen I echo JamesK around 12-18 months.

I suppose you need to ask yourself what it is worth to you financially? Are you going to start reaping the benefits from day 1 or will you need to invest funds before seeing any ROI?

Always tread with caution and remember, always ask yourself why is this guy happy to sell in the first place?

Consider profit margins, time needed to promote the site, how much money needs to be invested so that it is found, is it so big you need staff to manage it?

If the profit margins are small - the time needed to make the business work may not be worth it.

You could use Google Insights for search to see whether there is still a market online for the products or services sold on the site.

All very good points, appreciated, and certainly need factoring in.

It is interesting though, I would have thought somewhere, someone would have come up with a baseline formula, which you could apply when looking at potential opportunities.

Maybe between us all, we need to create one and offer it as a standard to the world

Biz Value = 18 months revenue (-) debt (-) overheads (x) fluffy magic number which includes traffic, exposure, and potential

By putting quality links and work on it can really promote it in a positive way. There are also may other ways but the most fastest and popular is this one.

Don't understand, what relevance has this got to valuing a website?