Is there a way to find out the actual value of your blog or website? If you wanted to consider accepting new publishing partners or were caressing the idea of selling out to someone else, would there be tools to help you gauge how much your site could be worth?

To be really honest, if I were you, I would use one of the traditional brick and mortar approaches to estimate your website value by multiplying your annual revenue for at least two or three years and setting that resulting value as an indicative market price you can sell most any business at. If you want to experiment a little with this standard approach, fly to CNN – What’s your business worth – really? which provides info and an easy to use calculator to estimate the potential selling value range of your business.

On the other hand, there is a growing set of free online web tools which claim to be able to provide as well an estimate of your website value. And if you have ever been wondering how much your site is really worth, these free online web services, will indeed provide some initial indication. But that’s where the value ends.

As a matter of fact, you may have a hard time finding any two of these free website estimation services returning the same value estimate for any website you submit.

Each one has likely a different approach to calculate how much your website is worth, and in most cases how this is done is never clearly disclosed on the service website.

In general, these web site value estimation services analyze the number of inbound links you have from other sites while assigning a monetary value to each. Additionally, some track your web site presence inside major directories (e.g.: DMOZ), your ranking on Alexa, your Google PageRank or additional data coming from other web site traffic data sources (e.g.: Compete, Quantcast, etc.).

The final result is that these website value estimation services are not really instruments on which to establish a business plan or an acquisition strategy but rather tools that you can use mostly to:

a) get an idea of what your site could be worth (by averaging some of the results obtained)

b) compare your site value to other competitors in your niche

c) measure trends over time

d) show off to your friends and colleagues how much your web site is worth

If you want to give these website value estimation services a spin, I suggest you check what differentiates each service from the next by looking at the comparative criteria I have utilized in the table below:

• Procedural Approach: explanations of how results are calculated
• Sources: Data sources utilized to estimate site value
• Results customization: options to personalize results or data sources used
• Embeddable Widget: opportunity to republish site value on other sites
• Custom URL: reference URL providing your site value

Here all the details:

Best Services To Estimate A Website Value Comparison Table

Best Services To Estimate A Website Value

1. SiteValueCheck

   

   No other free web service inside this guide is as clear as SiteValueCheck to explain how much your website is worth and WHY. Instead of giving you just an estimate of your website value (providing little or no explanation of how that result was obtained), SiteValueCheck shares detailed info on each and every criteria that is used for scoring your site. Data used to estimate your site is: Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, backlinks depth, average popularity of related web sites, age of search engine presence, and webpages load times. Unfortunately, the report you get is not customizable nor you can reach it at a specific URL. You cannot share your website value using a widget.
   
   http://sitevaluecheck.com/

2. Stimator

   

   Stimator measures the value of your website using the following data: relevance of the domain (.com scores more than .org or .net), inbound links, ranking of your site inside search engines, financial market fluctuations, and social media mentions. Stimator also indexes your website value for future reference. You won’t find a clear explanation of the procedure used to evaluate your website, nor any option to obtain a customized value (e.g. for a specific period of time). You can share your website score using a widget or a dedicate URL which is unique for your site.
   
   http://www.stimator.com/

3. ValueMyWeb

   

   Unlike the other services included in this guide, ValueMyWeb does not provide you an immediate result of the worth of your site, but rather processes your domain and e-mails you a unique link to access your own report. (Not customizable) data taken into account is: Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, organic keywords value, and social media mentions. At the bottom of the webpage with your report, there is also a small piece of HTML code you can copy and embed onto any website to show people how your website has scored.
   
   http://www.valuemyweb.com/

4. URL Appraisal

   

   URL Appraisal is a web service that evaluates your website using a proprietary algorithm. The service uses data from your domain age, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, Google inbound links, Yahoo! inbound links and URL marketability. Inside the About Us section of URL Appraisal website, you are explained how data is processed and calculated. The report of your website value is not customizable. You can share the score of your site using an embeddable widget or a URL which is unique to you.
   
   http://www.urlappraisal.net/

5. WebsiteValued

   

   Website Valued estimates how much your website is worth using data about your daily visitors, advertising revenue, sales revenue, and active subscribers. To get a tailored report of your website value, choose a specific period of time and then let the service generate again your site score. Unfortunately, you are not explained how Website Valued calculates the value of your site. With a dedicated URL for each site submitted to the service, you can access or share your own report page without launching Website Valuated again. No widget available.
   
   http://websitevalued.com/

6. MyWebsiteWorth

   

   MyWebsiteWorth appraises your website by looking at data from your Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rankings, unique visitors, and total visitors. The service shares no info on the process to obtain the value of your site, and you have no option to get a tailored value which refers to a specific period of time or webpage. You can share your website score by giving people the custom URL of your result page. No widget is available.
   
   http://www.mywebsiteworth.com/

7. DnScoop

   

   DnScoop analyzes the value of your website checking your Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, and domain age. You cannot narrow down your website score to a specific period of time or a specific web page. DnScoop does not allow you to share your website value with unique URL (but a widget is available). A clear outline of the steps taken to generate your website value is also missing.
   
   http://www.dnscoop.com/

8. Welcomia Website Value

   

   Welcomia provides a free tool to estimate the value of your website according to the following parameters: Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, backlinks, host IP, domain age, Google Adsense potential, DMOZ inclusion, search engine backlinks, and Google indexed pages. Unfortunately, the precision of the (not customizable) data you get, does not match a clear explanation of how data is processed during the estimation procedure. No custom URL is available to check your results at a later time, or share your score to other people. An embeddable widget is also missing.
   
   http://www.welcomia.com/

9. Site Value Calculator

   

   Site Value Calculator gives you an estimate of the value of your website or blog. A brief summary displays the criteria that Site Value Calculator uses to evaluate your site (Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, backlinks, domain age, DMOZ inclusion), but there is no explanation of what these results mean, why they matter, and how they are processed. You can share your score using a dedicated widget and a URL which is unique for your own site.
   
   http://www.sitevaluecalculator.com/

10. WebsiteOutlook

    

    WebsiteOutlook generates an estimate of the value of your website using the following data: net worth, daily pageviews, daily ads revenue, Alexa Traffic Ranking, Google PageRank, backlinks, DMOZ inclusion (a large open directory of human-reviewed web sites), host IP and server location. Unfortunately, Website Outlook does not provide any info on how your website data is calculated. WebsiteOutlook does not allow customizable reports. You can embed your website score using a dedicated widget or sharing a custom URL which is unique for your site.
    
    http://www.websiteoutlook.com/

11. CubeStat

    

    CubeStat appraises your website using data from: Alexa Traffic Ranking, Quantcast Traffic Ranking, Compete Traffic Ranking, Google PageRank, backlinks, Yahoo! Ranking, DMOZ inclusion (an open directory of human-reviewed websites), host IP, server location, and domain age. CubeStat fails to provide a clear explanation of which data is used to produce your website value. You cannot customize the way your website value is created or delivered. An embeddable widget and a custom URL for your website value result are also not available.
    
    http://www.cubestat.com/

12. Ninja Website Appraiser

    

    Ninja Website Appraiser is a free web-based tool that makes a quick evaluation of your website value using data from your PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rankings, average backlinks from major search engines, text link ads, product placement, and independent advertising sources. You get no info on how the data is processed, and you have also no additional option to narrow down the results and get a tailored report. To share your website value you can use a customized embeddable widget, but not a unique URL which points directly to a webpage which contains your site results.
    
    http://ninjawebsiteappraiser.com/

13. YourWebsiteValue

    

    Your WebSite Value uses some of the data related to your site (Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, inbound links, domain age) to generate an estimate of your website value. It is not clear (and not explanation is provided on the official website) how Your Website Value analyzes the data and produces the score for your site. You cannot get a customized report of your site value on a specific period of time. Your Website Value allows you to share the score of your site using a widget or a custom URL.
    
    http://www.yourwebsitevalue.com/

14. Website Calculator

    

    With Website Calculator you can appraise your website and check specific indicators used to score your site: Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Alexa traffic details, backlinks and IP geolocation. The service does not explain the procedure used to get your results, nor shares any info about what is PageRank, ATR, or any other estimate indicator. Website Calculator results cannot be customized and there is no specific URL that points to your website value. An embeddable widget to display your score is also not available.
    
    http://u2ws.com/index.php

15. How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

    

    How Much Is Your Blog Worth is an applet that calculates the value of your site using Technorati.com API. You cannot customize how the applet works (e.g. to generate your website value for a specific period of time). Also missing is a link back to Technorati.com that you can use to verify which data is taken into account and help producing your website value. You can share your website score using a widget, but not a unique URL.
    
    http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

16. Sootle Directory

    

    The free tool from Sootle Directory analyzes the backlinks of your website and gives you an estimate of its value. Once you get your website worth, you are given a piece of code to embed on any web page to show how much your domain has scored. The code is automatically updated when new backlinks are discovered. No custom URL is provided to check back your score without re-submitting the address of your site.
    
    http://directory.sootle.com/website-worth/

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on May18th, 2009 as “How Much Is My Site Worth? Best Services To Estimate A Website Value“.

Online ad optimization is the science of identifying on the basis of statistical data the best performing ads / ad network providers as well as the best performing ad position, layout, color and font style on your web pages.

Paul Edmondson, Co-Founder and CEO of YieldBuild, a online web service designed to “take the guesswork out of ad formatting“, has kindly agreed to have a good conversation with me to understand better how this service differs from already established online ad optimization services that focus specifically on real-time ad network optimization (such as Pubmatic and the Rubicon Project).

Paul was in San Francisco and I was in Rome, when, a few days ago, I recorded this interesting video conversation.

Here the complete recording and a full English text transcript. Check it out:

Interview With Paul Edmondson – CEO and Founder of YieldBuild

Full English text transcript

Intro

RobinGood: Hello everyone! Here’s Robin Good from Rome, Italy and I am here today with Paul Edmondson who is the CEO and founder of a very interesting company: Yieldbuild.

From what I understand, Yieldbuild allows you to test out a number of things and in real time you can select for you what is the best solution that you should adopt. But let’s find out from one of the fathers of Yieldbuild, Paul! How are you doing in San Francisco today?

Paul Edmondson: Doing very well, thanks for having us Robin.

What is Yieldbuild?

Robin Good: You’re very welcome. Thank you for reaching out and asking to have a conversation. That’s only what it takes indeed. Why don’t you introduce briefly yourself and Yieldbuild. What is Yieldbuild, from your take, in a short one, and what do you do over there?

Paul Edmondson: Sounds good. You got it right, I’m one of three founders of Yieldbuild and what we really set out to do is to help publishers make more money and that’s about helping them manage the monetization on their website through the various ad networks they choose.

To start, Yieldbuild it’s really about text ad optimization and what that means is we help publishers to pick out the right combination of elements. For example, let’s say you are a Google AdSense publisher. You wanna know: “should my background be white, should it be blue, should it be gray, should it have borders, what should font color be, what should the link color be…”

So what Yielbuild brings in is a set of heuristics that figures out, tests algorithmically, to find you the best combination of ads. Then after on that site it will also do your ad network management.

Easier Ads On Your Site

Robin Good: Good. I was not completely on-track, actually quite off-track and that is great that I didn’t know correctly what you’re doing because I’m much more curios now.

While you do have some of the ad optimization facilities, your key focus as is about understanding what is the best combination of components in a text ad to make it work, is that correct?

Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of summarizing it.

What we do is really specialize in the placement. There’s the placement and the formatting of those ad. Think about your page and how a publisher may lay out the ads on it. For example, they may put a 720×90 at the top of the page, a 300×250 in the sidebar, maybe another 300×250 in the content footer ad, maybe another ad on the other side.

We’ll find the best combination of the formatting attributes combined with the placement. Then, once we get a real good understanding of that, then we go into the ad network management.

A Solution For Publishers

Robin Good: Let me understand. This service is more targeted to an advertiser, who wants to understand how to best package his punch to an ad, or is it for a publisher to optimize the delivery and click-through of the ads he is carrying from his inventory?

Paul Edmondson: That’s a great question.

It’s a publisher solution.

For example, use AdSense. Most publishers that are getting started online use AdSense. It’s very easy to get going, just a little JavaScript that goes in your page. What they don’t know is really how to optimize their AdSense for the best performance for their site.

It’s a publisher solution and what we do is we help them tune their ads for the best response.

Overcoming Competitors

Robin Good: In this respect there are similarities or overlaps with the options offered by apparently similar services like PubMatic, the Rubicon Project or even some of the Google’s own tools that have been coming out in the last few months. I guess I’m thinking specifically of the Site Optimizer. What do you say?

Paul Edmondson: Yeah, first technical problematic at PubMatic and Rubicon is that I can’t speak for too much for those sites and those services. But I would say that what Yieldbuild does is it optimizes your entire ad layout of ads. It’s aware of all the different ads that you have in your page. It’ll do the formatting and the ad network optimization.

Our best understanding of Rubicon and PubMatic today is that they really focus on the ad network management behind one given spot.

We try to think about your page holistically and all the different ads that you have on your page and how they work as a ecosystem of ads for the publisher, so all the different rules that go behind their networks, all those types of things to give you the best monetization experience as a publisher.

The great question about the Site Optimizer for Google. One of the things that’s really interesting about the Site Optimizer. It’s built on multi-variant type testing. Let’s say for example you have a landing page and you need to figure out does the “buy now” button here work better than “save 15%“. Something like that. And what it does, it requires the publisher, requires the web site operator to go in it to find those tasks and set out those pages.

Yieldbuild is quite a bit different. In the sense that it goes in and sets up all the tasks algorithmically. It examines your site, figures out things that are about it and then it uses our optimization system to do all of that automatically. So no user setup for all the different tasks.

Placement Does Matter

Robin Good: That’s very cool indeed. And that’s something that had been bothering me about the Google Site Optimizer, so you’re right on the spot in thinking a way that, even if I only read about it, it made sense and motivated me to try it out. And I’m indeed motivated to go after you and your service.

I suppose that if we contribute our help in defining where we wanna try out things, I’m now imagining your tool displaying the ads with different colors, different fonts and styles until it finds a better click-through and then stays on that set of options that it has found. Is that how he dynamically learns about it?

Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that you talked about:

First, when you set up a site to get tested by AdSense it requires you to put in a piece of ad code in the page and then to continually move it around to find the different placements that work best for you.

But, with our system is you can put all the snippets of code in the page that you wanna possibly testing an ad location for. For example, let’s say you only want to show two ads at one time. You can put three or even five, or six zones in your page and then YieldBuild will look at those combinations of placements and do the best. Then it will do all that formatting placement, bold, all the different text options that you have for the given ad networks.

A Worthy Dish

Robin Good: Wow, well you know what, this is really exciting. I don’t know if to trust you or not but I gotta go try it out!

You know what? I think that the best video conversations are the ones that are like precious dishes at restaurants. They bring you this big dish with a small little thing on it and some fancy food decoration. You eat it and it feels like: “God, where’s the rest man? This is gonna cost me 35 bucks and there was nothing here!” But you know you’re not gonna forget that dish in that restaurant.

I think we got some jewels from you and I just wanna thank you. I don’t wanna go forward with more, I wanna go sign up and try it!

Paul Edmondson: Great! Hey Robin, thank you so much for having us. It was a lot of fun being out here.

Robin Good: Alright, have a great day in San Francisco and I’ll talk to you right after I try it!

Paul Edmondson: You too, take care!

Robin Good: Ciao!

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on September 4th 2008 as “Online Ad Optimization: YieldBuild Explains Itself – Paul Edmondson Video Interview”

About Paul Edmondson

Paul Edmondson is one of co-founders and CEO at YieldBuild. He held group management positions at MSN Entertainment over product management, quality management, operations, and business management. He also worked for MongoMusic and Hewlett-Packard after graduating from California Polytechnic University.