How much is a website with 100k monthly unique visitors worth?

I recently saw in the news that Punchfork.com was acquired by Pintrest.com for an undisclosed amount. Given Punchfork.com has 100,000 monthly visitors and 80,000 lines on Facebook but no advertising or revenue model, Im trying to use that situation as a gauge for how much my site (with similar traffic and similar product ) would be worth.

I have looked into some models for pre-money valuations for startups, but most of them include some calculation for future revenues. I dont have any ads on my site or any revenue model either, so how would Pintrest have calculated how much to purchase Punchfork for?

Traffic Valuation

asked Jan 7 '13 at 16:30

Craig H
33 points

Is it just a website or an application or a website selling a product or lead gen or ... ? – Casey Software 12 years ago
This question has no answer without a lot more details from you. It is like saying you saw the purchase price of a 2012 Mercedes at $50,000 and wonder if you can get that much for your 1994 Ford. And, as you can see from the answer below by Adrian, the value of a purchase can be entirely unrelated to the number of visitors. – Gary E 12 years ago

2 Answers

Im trying to use that situation as a gauge for how much my site (with similar traffic and similar product ) would be worth.

Pinterest didn't purchase Punchfork primarily because of the number of users.

They purchased it because Punchfork dominated a slice of the same market space as Pinterest (image based curation - in Punchfork's case of recipes). I would imagine that part of it is also getting the team's knowledge in-house.

Pinterest have - up front - bought Punchfork to shut it down. They've killed a competitor. What they would have paid to do that would depend on how much Punchfork thought having a competitor in their space would have damaged them.

answered Jan 7 '13 at 20:05

Adrian Howard
2,357 points

Basically, the valuation depends on what how the buyer is expecting to get value from the site. There are many objectives:

Revenue enhancement - the buyer will definitely look the pageviews and CTR on any ad monetisation on the site. You can then discount expected revenue cash flows to come up with a valuation.
Acquiring a patent - it could be that target holds a precious patent which the acquirer is after. Sometimes the acquirer cost to develop such a similar patented product will be costing more in terms of technical and financial resources. Let alone being overtaken by competition in the process.

So in essence a valuation is based what the buyer is looking for. I hope this helps.

answered Jan 9 '13 at 05:23

Kudzai
1 point