The Lack of Value in Blog Value Calculators

There are many sites out there that will tell you just how much your blog is worth. The thing is, actually quantifying a blog’s monetary value is really a crapshoot. And when it comes down to it, a blog is really only worth what other people think it’s worth. Think about it. If everyone decided tomorrow that Problogger was crap, no one would go there. With no traffic, you have nothing. So it’s really all about perception.

Despite this, it is kind of fun to see what is out there in terms of guessing a blog’s monetary value. Different services use different equations and I thought I’d take a little trip around and see what I could find. Here are the results of my trip.

Website Outlook

According to these guys, Pajama Professional is worth: $16,074.6

Daily Pageviews: 6763 - Right. I’m pretty sure this is one of those counts that includes each image that loads as a pageview. This blog, depending on which crappy software you trust, gets right around 300 unique hits a day. I know that’s not the same as pageviews, but I think that’s the proper count to be using when you are trying to be honest about how much your blog is actually worth.

Daily Ads Revenue: $22.02 - Not only do I not run many ads on this blog, but even if I tried to monetize, it’s an MMO/blogging blog and that topic is notorious for earning a whole lot of nothing. Very few MMO blogs are worth monetizing and I learned very quickly that Pajama Professional is not one of them. My monetization efforts are better spent on more profitable, less-techie niches. So I can’t really say if this estimate is right or not, but currently the daily ad revenue of this site is somewhere around - um - $0.

Traffic Rank: 162,644 - according to whom? I’m not sure because it’s not clear. So that’s stat helps a ton. Or not. I’m guessing it’s from Alexa because that is actually fairly close to what my SEO Toolbar says and further down the page there is a traffic graph attributed to Alexa. A really unhelpful traffic graph, I might add.

My pagerank came up right (3) and the backlinks (2338) also seem accurate compared to other services I’ve checked. Overall I thought this site guessed value a bit on the high side, but I ran Problogger.net and it told me it’s only worth $131,334.30. I honestly think that’s a pretty low number. So go figure.

CyberWyre Website Value Calculator

My value really took a nose dive here: $5,521

The Alexa and Google rankings are the same as those given by Website Outlook. This site bases the value on how monetizable (did I just make up that word?) your blog is. Apparently I could make $64 a month with Text Link Ads and about $89 with affiliate marketing. I’m not sure exactly how this adds up to a site value of $5.521. I guess they are throwing in some monetary value for the rankings because otherwise their algorithm takes the $153 I could supposedly earn each month and multiplies it by about 36. And that just doesn’t make sense.

My backlinks are also quite dismal according to CyberWyre: an “average of” 103. I’m not sure what they are averaging, but there are definitely more than 103 backlinks to Pajama Professional. Overall, this site’s numbers just don’t add up.

Smart PageRank

$331. Yup, according to Smart PageRank this site is worth a mere $331. Granted, when I ran the tool my Google pagerank was coming up 0 because it was on the fritz, but that shouldn’t make a drastic difference. The most interesting thing about this estimation is that the stats for Alexa, backlinks, etc. are the same as they were for CyberWyre. So I’d say that, unless they lean heavily on Google pagerank as a means of value, Smart PageRank is very conservative with their value estimates.

For comparison, Problogger.net is worth only $9,287 according to this tool. If that’s the truth I’ll be first in line at the bank tomorrow. And, no, I don’t mean I have $10,000 in the bank, I mean that I would borrow it from the bank. If I had that kind of money in the bank I’d be writing this from a much more glamorous place than my home office in Silverdale, WA.

dnScoop

DNScoop says my blog is worth: $3,914. Something this tool pointed out is the age of my domain. As you probably know, the older your domain is, the better. As long as it doesn’t have a shady past, an older domain is always going to be more trusted and, thus, “worth” more. I just registered this domain in February 2007, so it doesn’t really have any history.

I was amused by the piece of this page that told me what other sites were on the same IP as I am. They included: boobsonthemove.org, jesus.com.do and whoor.com. Quite a mix, huh?

Xinu Returns and CubeStat

I’m not sure how the name Xinu Returns applies to website stats - it appears to be a misspelled Scientology reference. Of course, L. Ron himself couldn’t settle on one spelling of Xenu so I suppose you can’t ask for better from mere mortals. Anyway, all Scientology jokes aside, this tool is awesome. It shows you all kinds of cool stuff all in one place: pagerank, backlinks according to various search engines, Diggs, bookmarks, subscribers and the list goes on.


Xinu Returns links to another tool called CubeStat that is much like the other value calculators I have talked about in this article. According to CubeStat, my blog is valued at $14,813.16. The real gem here is Xinu Returns, though. What a great way to see a ton of valuable information in one place. I know there are others like it, but I really like the layout of this one and the various services it includes.

That brings to an end my tour of site value calculators. If you know of one that I missed that’s worth checking out, please let me know in the comments. Obviously the conclusion here is that the data is inconclusive. While all the numbers that go into the formula appear to be close to equal, each one of these tools formulas are so different that you can’t really trust any of them. This brings me back to the beginning of this post. A blog is only worth what other people think it is worth. And that’s the bottom line.

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