With all the mergers and acquisitions going on at the minute, it is only natural to wonder what the value of your site/blog is. I see Tom Murphy recently mentioned that Boards.ie was offered $750,000 for the site back in the original dot.com bubble but they turned it down. I wonder what it would be worth now that we are in the dot blog bubble.
Well, part of that speculation has been made easier for us by Tristan Louis – he analysed the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal in great detail and came up with a valuation of $564.64 per inward link for a blog. I’m not sure if there is an easy way to tell how many inward links boards.ie has. Google reports 2910 – but that doesn’t account for the deeper links to the various fora and discussions. Still – even this conservative figure values Boards.ie at over $1.6m – nice one guys.
In my own case, Technorati reports 466 links into this site (from 118 sites). So that puts a value of $263,122 on this site! I tell you what, I’ll let it go for an even $250,000 😉
In all seriousness, influential blogger or not, there is no way that this site is worth that much. Valuations like that do nobody any favours (except perhaps Jason Calacanis). We are back in the dot com bubble days all over again. The bubble is going to burst with all the financial losses and pain that brings. Again. And technology is going to get an even worse name than it has had for the last 3-4 years.
How do we avert this second spectacular fall from grace? I have no idea – anyone who has any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
UPDATE:
I see Kevin Burton is thinking along the same lines.
bubble ?
what bubble ?
Yeah I completely agree. The only thing I would say is to strike while the iron is hot and get blogging, etc embedded into Internet Culture. I was at the Empathy Marketing Morning Conference in the Guiness Storehouse recently and one of the points raised by Guy Phillipson was that after the dotcom bubble burst, people didn’t stop using the Net. Advertisers might have, but the public increased their use. The same will happen after the blog bubble burst.
Unfortunately it happens with every industry. I can’t remember off the top of my head but the automobile industry in the States started with about 90 companies and within a few years it was down to half a dozen. There’s too much money being bandied about and nobody seems to be buying (by that I mean the consumer), so let’s enjoy the wave while it lasts.
My one piece of advice would be to use the online conversation and voice our criticism, hopefully whoever has opened their purse strings will notice and tighten them a little.
Apparently my blog is worth €7,904. I may cash that in when I want to buy a car. 🙂
“How do we avert this second spectacular fall from grace?”
By learning from history. We will attempt to answer this sort of question in my next blogoposium entitled Lessons Learned from Web 1.0.
It’s only tech-blogs that seem to be worth something.
My effort is only worth $339,913.28. I am more open to offers than Paris Hilton’s legs around a night-vision camera.