Posted by newswatch on November 19, 2007 at 7:20am
This seemed the most appropriate forum; so I am posting my query here.
I want to know whether someone has some kind of formula to evaluate the value of a news website? I site I have in mind is not a generic news site, but a b2b news site.
Depending on current unique users, potential users, current revenue, potential revenue, site size, site architecture, etc.
Whatever I have seen so far on the Web is all ad hoc. There doesn't seem to be any vague formula even anywhere. Does anyone have any idea about existing benchmarks?
Some parameters can be quantified, while some can't be.
Can be quantified:
- Current unique users
- Potential unique users
- Current repeat visitors
- Current monthly revenue
- Potential monthly revenue
- Current monthly profit
- Potential monthly profit
- Number of individual items (discounting category pages/search result pages etc)
- Backlinks from sites
- Google PageRank
- Alexa site rating
- XHTML compatibility (code perfection)
- Age of domain
- Age of content
Cannot be quantified:
- Quality of content
- Visual aesthetic/design
- Quality of domain name
- Site navigation
Can one arrive at a ballpark figure depending on these? Any ideas how to do that?
Cheers.
Subir
Comments
Benchmarking
Interesting question - how to evaluate the value of the a news site.
First, a question: What do you mean by a "b2b news site"? (All I could think of was business-to-business, but it didn't really make sense to me...)
Second: The "value" of a news site must surely depend on what perspective you take.
I'm pretty certain that advertisers are interested in high traffic on the site - meaning many visists and many unique users. On the other hand, the owners are interested in the income from the site (assuming that it is a commercial news site), and to some extent also the quality of the content (assuming that there is some ideological backbone too). For the users/visitors, the content of the web site is of course the most important factor (and the possibility to access it).
Nevertheless, I think that most of the qualities above can be boiled down to just a few. Something like this:
* Owners care about generating money. Traffic, content, page ranking, design and all the rest are means to getting there. I'm not sure how to assess "potential revenue" - it seems more like a rating how efficiently the site is managed than of the site itself.
* Traffic is probably the most important factor influencing revenue (and other factors). You may twiddle with other parameters to increase the revenues, but traffic will remain you Master Volume. Page ranking, design, domain name and similar are only ways of increasing the traffic -- not a goal in itself.
This means that the question of how to evaluate a news site depends mainly on how to measure visits -- which I understand is far from easy. (On top of that you may ask under which circumstances it is reasonable to have visitors to pay for content, how much resources it is sensible to spend on improving design versus creating content, and so on. But I believe that this to a large extent will be a matter of experimenting and measuring the effect.)
Anyways, I was already going to investigate how Swedish news papers are usually assessed when it comes to traffic. If I find anything sensible, I'll post it here.
Cheers!
//Johan Falk, Sweden
B2B
Is indeed "business to business," as opposed to B2C or "business to consumer" sites.
They're basically what, in the old days, would be called "trade journals" or "trade publications" or a couple other things I won't repeat :-). And if they're run right, they can charge much higher ad/lead-generation rates than B2C sites because of the niche nature of their audiences.
www.networkworld.com is an example (which springs to mind because I work there). Alas, I don't have anything helpful to add on the original question, since I'm an editor, not one of the business folks.
TNS Matrix
It appears that Swedish, Norwegian and maybe Danish newspaper web sites are usually measured by the TNS Matrix, relying on the following data:
The measurement uses a script attached at the end of each page, and is mostly used to set prices for web advertising.
//Johan Falk, Sweden
p/e ratio
the usual way this works is to look for similar sales. it is tough data to get, but you can look at comparable other newspaper companies and see what they recently sold for versus their earnings. this is called th price/earnings ratio and it is usually comparable for most companies in an industry.
Other Quantifiable Elements of a newspaper website
Off the top of my head, here are a few more:
Stuff you can figure out without "inside information"
Stuff you can't figure out without "inside information"
Joe Murphy
Senior Developer
The Denver Post
webynk(dot)com
Check your website value and world ranking on www.webynk.com or www.webynk(dot)com.
Check on regular basis and see how it is improving. You can check of other site also.