Putting a financial value on a blog
What’s a blog worth? If you sold it, what price would it fetch?
I’m fascinated by this post at 24/7 Wall Street: The 25 Most Valuable Blogs. Maybe my fascination is unwarranted — I don’t claim to have a head for business, and perhaps the clean-sounding logic in the article would fail to impress a savvy business analyst. But until someone tells me otherwise, I’m going to consider this a tutorial in online content that pays its own way.
To determine value, 24/7 Wall St. looked at unique visitor and pageviews information from several public sources including Alexa, Quantcast, Compete, and comScore. These services are often criticized for estimating website traffic too low and we have taken that into account to the extent possible. We also looked at audience measurements provided by the blogs themselves when it seemed credible. Our estimated CPMs for ads are based on the current display and text ad environment, the quality of ads at each blog, and the number of ads that it runs on the average pages. The CPM value assigned to each blog is based on all of the ads it runs on its typical pages.
This is far from idle speculation, so I find it quite absorbing to ponder what has made these blogs so successful. I would even suggest that journalists, publishers, magazine entrepreneurs, and the like should ponder it too.
As you might expect, you’ll find Gawker, Huffington Post, and TechCrunch on the list. But the sites that are less akin to household names could be very instructive:
- Seeking Alpha: Stock market opinion and analysis.
- Politico: One of the great success stories of online journalism — read the brand-new New Republic article about this site!
- Smashing Magazine: I admit, I love this site like crazy. It is a fount of great examples of Web design and development, an unending source of inspiration.
- SB Nation: “Sports blogs by fans, for fans” — a whopping 185 of them.
- Destructoid: “The hardcore gamer’s community” — PlayStation, Xbox, etc.
- /film (slashfilm.com): Alternative movie news and reviews. (Not slasher movies!)
- Neatorama: Mainly “news of the weird,” but a little more than that, less freakish and more good-natured.
As we look forward to the future of journalism, we need to examine models like these and adapt them. What can we learn from them?
Categories: blogging, examples
Blog, or frequently updated website? With the new wordpress/CMS functionality the distinction has all but disappeared.
[...] McAdams is focusing on the business models of financially successful blogs. I’m fascinated by this post at 24/7 Wall Street: The 25 Most Valuable Blogs. Maybe my fascination [...]
This a good topic, since journalist are always struggling to get paid… Two questions:
1) What is best: to include the google adds or other, like AdBrite, or so… or to offer your platform to local bussiness (that implies to work and knock on doors selling advertising…)
2)What would be the best option for a latinamerican -independent- journalist working with blogger?