I just read a pretty cool post at 45n5.com about the current value of make money online blogs where Mark came up with an ‘interesting’, if not the most scientific, way to value blogs that discuss how to make money on the internet. In that post, the general idea was to take a look at what some blogs in the Make Money Online (MMO) niche have recently sold/are selling for and calculate how much each subscriber is worth in order to try to figure out the value of other blogs within the same niche based on RSS subscriber count.
The conclusion was that each subscriber to an MMO blog was worth $18.42. This was especially exciting to me, as a new blogger, because it enabled me, at least in a round about way, to get some notion of what THIS blog is currently worth. Let’s do some math…
Assuming each subscriber is worth $18.42, all I had to do was take the number of subscribers to KillerIncome.net and multiply by $18.42. As you can see, I have exactly one subscriber - forget for the moment that it is probably me - and if I multiply 1 subscriber x $18.42 = $18.42, I can conclude that this blog is worth $18.42! Astounding.
But you may be wondering why I am so excited about this seemingly insignificant revelation. Well, mainly because $18.42 is about $17.46 more than I originally thought this blog was worth. How would you like to have an asset that was worth seventeen times what you thought it was worth. Let’s say your house, for example. Maybe you thought your house was worth 300k; if it were worth seventeen times this amount, your house would be valued at just over five million dollars! Holy crap, right?
Also, now that I can estimate that this blog is worth over eighteen dollars, all I need to do is build one-thousand more blogs with one subscriber each (it really didn’t take me that long) and I’ll make eigthteen grand. I’ll be able to buy a Saturn. Wow! Just think once I’ve replicated my success 10,000 times - now you’re talking about real money. Is this possible? You betcha!
All kidding aside, the post by Mark was pretty cool and fun to read, but as I said in my previous post about why I consider organic search engine traffic to be superior to RSS subscriber traffic, I think creating blog valuations solely based on subscriber count is a flawed way of estimating blog value - no matter what niche the blog is in. Suppose you had two similar blogs for sale. Blog A has 23,000 RSS subscribers and makes 5k per month, while Blog B has 200 RSS subscribers and makes 6k per month. Personally, I would prefer to own Blog B because B’s income, presumably, comes from organic search engine traffic, which is easier to sustain, easier to monetize, and more independent of the blog owner.
So, how much do you think your blog is worth and why? Check out Mark’s post over at 45n5.com to see what some other make money online blogs are being valued at. And while you’re doing that, I’ll be taking my $18.42 to the bank!
