How Do You Price Website Traffic?

I’ve spent a lot of time shopping for websites lately. It’s amazing what folks are willing to let their blogs go for. I’m seeing 80-150 post, 2+ year old sites with traffic around 1000 visits per day going for as little as $500. It’s a shame that more people don’t stick it out. All that blood sweat and typing selling for what probably amounts to 50 cents per hour is a damn shame.

The first year, the building up from nothing is so hard and unrewarding that people are just giving up because the measly 3 bucks they get from Google’s Adsense will take another 30 months before that first whooping $100 check comes in the mail. Well I’m here to say stick in there folks. That traffic is worth more than you think.

How do you price it though? That’s a great question because all internet visitors are not created equal. Like everything else in life it boils down to quality x quantity.

Let’s tackle quantity first; don’t trust just any analytics screen showing you stats. Verify via a credible 3^rd party analytics package such as Core Metrics, Google Analytics (GA), or some other professional product that can eliminate bots, scripts and other non-human visitors from your stats. Packages like AWStats and other raw web server applications will typically inflate traffic by 100-400%. Once you have a good number take note of the average pages per visit and bounce rate and this will give you a good estimation of how much information you are putting in front of real eyeballs.

Secondly and more importantly quality; there is a big difference between what Amazon can do with a human visitor and what this blog can do. There are two ways to make money on the internet, you either sell a product/service or you advertise for someone who is. That is all, the internet is actually that dead simple. So how do you monetize a visit and what’s your conversion factor? A mature blog may average $30 per month with a thousand daily visits. That’s about a tenth of a penny ($30 / 30,000 visits) per visit. What do you think Amazon will pay for general clicks? I don’t have insider information but I have worked with enough large corporations to confidently say it is up around $.50 to $1.

So back to our question, how do you price website traffic?

Come up with a number for what that traffic is worth to you. If you plan to use Adsence and your good, call it half a cent. If you have your own retail websites like I do review your conversion rates and multiply that by your average profit per sale, in my case I use about 10-20 cents depending on the demographics. If you have direct ad placement deals, affiliate networks, etc then do the math. When you have a monthly number multiply it out by 10 to 30 depending on longevity of site content.

Therefore our example site above which has 1000 visits per day should be able to generate 20 clicks per day from ads. That’s $4 for someone like me, multiple that out by 12 months and you have $1460. That’s $1460 just for the traffic in this example blog which does not take any other assets such as domain name into account.

… and thus I continue to shop… [please contact me if you are selling your blog]

Tags: Adsence, Google Analytics, selling websites, website traffic