Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi,

I'm working with a young website called www.skeptive.com/

Skeptive.com informs users about the trustworthiness of a site based on their and other similar users' ratings. Skeptive also provides a platform for debating disputed topics or questions.

Over the past 30 days, it's had 4,000 plus visitors, growing at about a 30% clip per week.  90% of these visitors are new, mostly from SE traffic.

How would you value a company at this stage?  www.skeptive.com/ is a working product, but it has very little traffic.  I imagine it's a combination of the actual potential of the product, the number of visitors, growth in number of visitors and page views per visitor.

How would you put the numbers together to come up with a value for the site??

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Dan

What exactly is your revenue model? How are you turning traffic into cold hard cash? When you answer those questions, then you can start to think about a valualtion for the site.

Thanks.  Not so much thought has been put into this, because the only significant source of revenue we can think of would be ad sales.

Giving priority to sponsored sites could generate some revenue, but we wouldn't want to damage the integrity of the disputes.  Also, users might pay a premium to have more power over the content of the site, but that revenue stream would be minimal.

Given only ad sale revenue, is there a back of the envelope calculation for how to value a site based on page views, growth in page views and time spent on site?  There must be something out there.  Perhaps a bootstrap valuation equation like:

If revenue = time spent on site * ad sales per time + hits * ad sales per incremental hit

(revenue - variable expenses)/ (1 - equity discount rate - yearly growth in revenue)

Oops... totally forgot we might be able to sell anonymous web usage data