How accurate is Website Outlook?
Posted by whoknew on Sunday, January 25, 2009 in Uncategorized
I have noticed that nowadays people are relying more and more on stats to confirm that the website they own or run is growing in a positive manner. Be it with Google Analytics, Website Outlook or other comparable site’s the information can be misleading and inaccurate.
Tons of people rely on Website Outlook each day to get a status update on what they could possibly get if they decided to sell their domain name or site as a whole. The real question is how accurate are these services? In reality in no shape, size or way are websites similar to websiteoutlook.com any where near accurate. The reason behind this is in the way that Website Outlook and it’s competitors gets their numbers. The entire service is relying on your ad revenue, number of daily site hits and your overall freshness of your site. a.k.a how long it has been since changes have been made to your site. Using this method results can be spastic, one day telling you that your site is worth hundreds of dollars more that what it was worth yesterday or a week ago. Thus making this a very poor way to judge organic and dynamic growth.
A more accurate way in predicting the overall value of your site is calculate how much you make per month in revenue and multiply that by a factor of 10 or higher depending on the overall size of your site. So for example Geekologist for the month of January has made $32.67 in ad-sense revenue so $32.67*10 = $326.70 Using this method is much more accurate in predicting what you might actually be offered if someone contacted you about a possible purchase.
It is a shame that site like Website Outlook provide such terrible insight into the overall value of websites and instill false hope in websites that make no revenue. A website that makes no revenue is worth nothing to someone looking to buy, sponsors or even possible investors. Without any revenue model how can those investor, sponsors or purchasers expect to get any return investment.
If you are truly looking for a scale to judge your website I suggest using Google Analytics or just play it by ear. Regardless of how many site hits you get it is always going to be the overall experience that you give the readers, viewers, or listeners that will keep them coming back.
What do you think about Website Outlook or websites like it? Leave us a comment!
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I agree with this post to a certain extent. There is one vital factor I think you’re leaving out in the valuation process and that is labor (time spent maintaining the site and/or making it generate revenue). Do you spend 1 hour a month or 40 hours a month on the site?
That will significantly affect the price a site is valued at even if it generates a large amount of revenue. Granted this is more of a factor if you’re actually looking to sell the site. For example, BestTechie requires a decent amount of time to maintain/write/record for and if I were to sell it that may potentially hurt the selling price. Nonetheless, since I’m not selling it I can enjoy the revenue I make from it since I personally consider the time spent on it “fun”.
Yes i agree…. but the site it’s pure statistic and made by the number of visits daily in your site!
I think they did like that if your daily traffic is 600 , from that 600 persons clicked your ads from your site… and the result is 3 dollars per day ..for example.. it’s pure statistic !
Hi! I have found another website traffic and value estimator site. I’m talking about http://www.estimix.com. The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.
I wish it was true my site says it was valued at $700 dollars the one day! i’d sell now haha
I also recommend to check my favorite tool called Surcentro – http://www.surcentro.com
Its well created with pretty nice design and SEM analytics intergrated with SEMrush.
I TOTALLY AGREE! This site is extremely harmful in its estimates to websites. It over prices some, and underprices others. It would almost appear that the owner of websiteoutlook could be held responsible for claims it makes since the search engine preliminary results shows that (your website) is worth $____ without any disclaimers unless you go to the site. I believe they need to change the way their preliminary search results show on search engines…they could be in legal trouble if they are not careful.