What Your Blog Is Worth
posted by Daniel Solove
Show me the money! Business Opportunities Weblog has created a nifty calculator that computes what your blog is worth. (Hat tip: BoingBoing.) According to the description:
Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I’ve created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.
Tristan Louis’s valuation scheme is based on AOL’s recent purchase of Weblogs, Inc.:
AOL bought Weblogs inc., the two year old weblog network founded by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, for a number that is rumored to be anywhere between $25 million and $40 million. In this process, Time Warner may be providing some ideas as to the valuation of blogs by traditional media.
This link provides the rest of his rationale for his valuation scheme, which is based on the links to a blog, not the visitor traffic. I’ll leave it to those with more expertise to assess the strength of his valuation scheme.
So, using the blog value calculator provided at Business Opportunities Weblog, and without further delay, the value of Concurring Opinions is . . . drumroll . . . $33,307.86. And we’re not even a month old yet!
Here are the results for some popular law blogs. Not all blogs come up with values, including some very popular ones, so I don’t vouch for this one bit. But it sure is fun plugging in URLs:
Volokh Conspiracy = $1,327,798.08
– Orin, your colleagues expect many fine dinners and drinks on you
Balkinization = $285,092.70
Discourse.net = $173,878.32
Ideoblog = $55,889.46
Conglomerate = $135,489.60
Crescat Sententia = $114,601.62
How Appealing = $276,624.60
Instapundit = $3,826,452.12
– Nearly $4 million. Wow!
Legal Theory Weblog = $166,539.30
Leiter Reports = $260,817.48
SCOTUSBlog = $587,121.60
Yin Blog = $46,856.82
Underneath Their Robes = $163,716.60
And finally, the Harriet Miers’s Blog! is worth $277,753.68. By the way things are looking, she should sell now.
October 25, 2005 at 1:50 am
Posted in: Blogging
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Responses (6)
David Zaring - October 25, 2005 at 11:24 am
I actually found this thing via googling – it’s obviously hit a meme, because I just posted something about it on the Glom.
My question: how are you going to hedge this rip-roaring internet success. It’s what ruined Enron.
Mike - October 25, 2005 at 1:18 pm
I realize you’re having fun, but the method assumes that all incoming links are equal. They’re not, on at least two levels. First, a link from Instapundit’s page means that more people are following the link. (I.e., a link is more valuable as a traffic driver.) Second, links don’t mean anything outside of the page rank (PR) context. Decent page rank summary. A link from a blog with a high PR will increase the PR of the linkee. From a PR perspective, I’d rather have ten links from PR6 and PR7s than thirty links from fledgling blogs.
BTW, PR and traffic are correlated, but not perfectly. E.g., I (sometimes – as we switch) have a higher PR than Doug Berman, but his site gets 2 or 3 times my traffic. (And it’s objectively better. But since my blog is a bit more general, I get more links. The trick to getting a lot of links or having a high-hit blog is to write about a lot of different topics. It also helps to be a party hack – left or right wing.) You can see the PRs of crim law blogs here.
Anyhow, I realize your post was just for fun. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket or to one-up you. I just figured you’d enjoy learning a bit about PR.
Mike - October 25, 2005 at 1:25 pm
P.S. PR is important because it means that when a person enters a search term into Google, your blog is more likely to be returned as a result. One reason that older blogs get more traffic is because a lot of people reach them Googling random things. (Look at a Sitemeter to a popular blog. You’d be surprised at how much of their traffic is Google-driven. You’ll also see a lot of zero-second visits, since the Goolers leave immediately.) Thus, people who (like me) waste their time thinking about what makes a blog valuable would argue that raw traffic is not a good measure of a blog’s influence. Rather, we’d want to know who was reading the blog (most of us would rather have readers from uscourts domains than k12.edu), and whether people were regular readers, since developing an audience is how one increases his or her influence.
Ideoblog - October 26, 2005 at 10:33 am
Selling blogs
I have been out of the loop the last few days soaking in the desert sun in Arizona and getting ready to talk about one of my favorite subjects: contractual choice of law. But I couldn’t resist commenting on the
Crescat Sententia - October 26, 2005 at 11:52 am
Selling Crescat
Some recent silliness has led people to attempt to figure out the cash value of various blogs– including this one (circa $114,000). Larry Ribstein has a smart reply pointing out that what exactly this figure means is a little confused,…
Concurring Opinions - November 15, 2005 at 1:28 am
Amazing Investment Opportunity!
About three weeks ago, I blogged about the silly calculator that computes the value of your blog. At the time, Concurring Opinions was worth $33,307.86. Not too shabby, but not ready to sell yet. Out of curiosity, I checked back…
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