How Much Is That Website in the Window?

Seth Godin mentioned DNScoop on his blog yesterday. It's a self-contained site-worth appraisal service, which utilizes various criteria -- Alexa ranking, number of inbound links, Google pagerank, and even the age of a site -- to determine that's site's approximate worth.

A quick check of their methodology revealed some amusing facts:

Rocketboom and Ze Frank, two of the heaviest hitters in the new media marketplace, are each worth over $3 MILLION dollars, according to DNScoop.

Meanwhile, Something to Be Desired is worth a paltry $6,000. I have a feeling this has to do with our Alexa ranking bottom through the basement recently... which is interesting, considering our actual daily traffic has been growing over the past few months.

And "stbd.com," which is the URL I'd previously been interested in purchasing as the home for our web series, is worth less than $300 according to DNScoop... which is also interesting, since the gent who owns the URL flatly told me a year ago that he routinely charges in the mid-4 figures for a "standard 4-letter domain name... But since 'stbd' also stands for 'starboard'," as he reminded me, this would presumably push his price even higher.

With sites like DNScoop and Alexa in play, it's impossible for anyone to lie about their numbers anymore. Each of us can independently verify a site's claims about its traffic at the click of a mouse.

But is any of it accurate?

What the Numbers DON'T Tell Us

For the uninitiated AND the veterans, here are five things to consider when surveying web numbers:

1. Alexa only counts traffic generated while using the Alexa toolbar. As most people know, the Alexa toolbar tends to be native only to Internet Explorer, which means it's not accurately counting visits made by users using Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. By and large, that means MAC surfers aren't being counted at all.

2. Web hosts could game Alexa -- if they wanted to. One of our highest Alexa traffic spikes came not when we launched Season Three of STBD, but in the two weeks before it. That's because we were spending a huge amount of time on the site's back-end, using proprietary web tools to update each page of the site. ALL of that traffic counts as "visits." Were I shady or unwise, I could do the same thing every day to inprove our numbers... except I no longer work on a PC unless necessary, which means I can't influence Alexa.

3. Automated web appraisers don't process intangibles. If I emailed the guy who owns "stbd.com" again and mentioned that his site is really only worth a couple hundred dollars, he'd laugh me out of the room. Why? Because he knows the value of the URL is based upon two additional factors: level of interest and level of potential. DNScoop doesn't know that STBD stands for starboard OR something to be desired, nor does it care. It's only interested in measurables, and there's not much to measure about an unbuilt website.

4. Site awareness exceeds direct traffic. Our STBD videos are hosted via Blip.TV. If anyone goes to Blip and watches our video there, instead of through our homepage, we don't register those numbers. Blip still tells us the video was watched, but that viewer doesn't count as a visitor to our website. Ditto anyone who watches an episode on MySpace, or any other third-party site. Does that mean these people don't know Something to Be Desired exists? Of course not. But Alexa and DNScoop don't know that.

5. ALL web value is subjective. Just as the owner of "stbd.com" believes his site is worth more than $300, I'm sure neither Ze Frank nor Andrew Baron will be selling their sites for $3 million dollars anytime soon. Some people might consider $3 million for those sites insanely overpriced; I suspect both men would consider them undervalued. I'd say the same thing about our site at $6,000.

But then, we're all considering value from the insider's point of view. We "know" what things are worth because we understand their potential WITHIN OUR INDUSTRY. But, like baseball cards, comic books, cars and real estate, EVERYTHING is worth exactly what you can get for it -- and that will ALWAYS be subjective.