Valuing Adult Sites -- Factors To Consider?
 

Hey, everybody. I've started getting inquiries and offers about a couple of my sites -- I've got some adult blogs and one niche TGP with decent traffic and nice search engine placement. Of course I know better than to ask this assemblage for specific valuation opinions; were it not for the new eight character rule, I'd surely drown in a sea of :2 cents: :2 cents: and similar persiflage. However, I am curious what factors you consider when you buy or sell an adult site. And how heavily do you rate them?

1) Revenue -- I've heard people apply the bricks-and-mortar rules of thumb such as "two years revenue of the business" and the like. Does that really capture the whole story with online businesses? And if so, what revenue rules of thumb do you use? (Not that it will do me a lot of good -- a lot of my revenue is affiliate income, and most affiliate program stats are so worthless that, when you have sales from various sites, it's impossible to attribute revenue to a specific site with any precision.)

2) Page rank -- how much does it matter? Lots of folks here say "not at all" --- but in my experience, my PR6 blog helps a lot of my lesser sites get PR4s and PR5s in no time, along with decent search engine placement for all. If I sold the PR6 site, I'd miss it keenly -- but it's very hard to know how to value the loss.

3) Traffic -- do you use traffic as a metric for value? And if so, what are the rules of thumb for valuing different types of traffic?

4) Backlinks -- surely having 5k quality backlinks has a different economic value than having 500. But how much?

5) Assets -- does the IP (a few years of blog posts, domain names, etc.) figure seriously into the equation, separate from revenue or other factors?

6) Other factors -- anything I haven't thought of?

I realize there are no firm answers to any of these questions, and that what answers there are will vary from site to site. But if there were such a thing as a professional appraiser of adult online businesses, what would his appraisal method look like?

a nice design is very important I believe, I would rank it in the top 5 most important elements

Great thread. I'd be interested re what due diligence steps would you guys take in valuating/verifying the income of an adult site.

Yeah, me too. I could come up with VERY rough estimates of revenue -- enough perhaps to illuminate my own answer to the "what would you want for it" question -- but there's no way in hell I could prove revenue for any of my sites to the satisfaction of a potentially sceptical buyer.

Interesting. But suprising to me. Sites are easily redesigned in this era of templates and CSS -- I'd think a buyer would expect to redesign any purchased site the way a new homebuyer expects to renovate window treatments.

Age of the site. A 3 month TGP and a 6 year old paysite have two different sets of value.

Asset classes. Exclusive content of a paysite can be repurposed several ways.

Good point!

another element to consider is how long term your traffic alliances are. Perhaps, assign a score re traffic dependency on others.

Yeah -- that's an aspect of traffic quality I hadn't considered.

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