AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs - 24/7 Wall St.

There is no way to accurately put a value on blogs and blogging companies. All are privately-held and, as is true with many content businesses, the value of the company is based on what a buyer will pay. The figures we have put together look at advertising revenue and income from related businesses like conferences. We have not included blogs affiliated with larger media companies. It is too difficult to break-out what their traffic may be and how their income is divided with the parent. Some blogs are fronts for other businesses like O’Reilly Radar Those have been left out. A lot of big blogs do not make the list because they bring in very little commercial revenue. Treehugger probably falls into that category.

We looked at unique visitor and page view measurement services when possible: Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. These services are often criticized for estimating website traffic too low. We have tried to take that into account. We also looked at data at blogs which gave their own ad rates and page views. Our estimated page CPMs are based on quality of ads and number of ads on each page. We looked at margins based on headcount and our opinion of how may of the people are full-time. Current growth rate based on our measurement sources was also taken into account. A site with traffic doubling year-over-year was give a higher multiple than one with flat traffic. Because not all blogs make money, we looked at multiples of operating income and revenue. These are completely estimates because of the tiny number of blogs which have been sold and lack of information about what the multiples may have been.

Finally, large blogs with big “moats” got higher multiples than smaller ones. Blogs with one founder who contributes a substantial amount of the content got lower multiples than those with several good writers. Blogs which appear to be well-funded or have operated for a long time got better multiples than newer sites or ones where it was not clear that there was a big pool of money behind them.

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