Domain Name Valuation per Online Estimators
Kirt's Cogitations™ #281

As mentioned in the past, I put a fair amount of effort into making RF Cafe as user friendly and resourceful as possible while also providing a valuable venue for RF product and services companies to advertise. Reading articles on search engine optimization, effective user interface and user experience, webpage organization, navigation, page load speed and content organization are popular topics that the 'experts' have decided are most important to success. My ultimate philosophy has been to make RF Cafe the kind of website I enjoy visiting.

A piece in a recent issue of Website magazine discussed how to put a price on your domain name based on statistics like inbound traffic from other websites (who is referring you with a hyperlink), outbound traffic (where you are sending visitors via hyperlinks), page views, unique visitors, revenue generated, page rank in the major search engines (Google and Bing are the only ones that really matter), and a few other parameters. The author recommends hiring a professional firm to do that job for you rather than rely on valuations calculated by algorithms on various websites. Both objective and subjective decisions are needed to arrive at a meaningful result. The single largest factor is, per the article, an estimate on how much could be earned by hosting third-party ads on the website. After that comes traffic rankings per unassociated monitoring sites like Alexa, which collects its data from browsers that have the Alexa extension installed and therefore is not a true random representation of users. Of course like a lot of people, the next thing I did was seek out some of the online calculators to see how they ranked RFCafe.com to learn why they were so bad. I quickly found out. There is a full explanation of their domain worth / website value calculator algorithm KPIs (key performance indicators) if you care to try to digest it all.

The table to the right presents results of valuation calculations run on SitePrice.org, considered to be one of the more 'realistic' algorithms. Most websites are the ones I visit daily when looking for industry news. The ridiculousness of some of the numbers is apparent when considering the ARRL.org domain, which SitePrice figures to be worth a mere $193,363, and Analog.com (Analog Devices) to be worth $221,591. The ARRL.org domain name, if you could buy it (which you surely cannot), would easily sell in the tens of millions of dollars. Analog.com is worth whatever the company itself would sell for (billion$).

SitePrice.org retains valuations from analysis run in the past and displays those dollar values and dates. You can do a refresh to get current numbers. If you click on any of the hyperlinks in my website table to the right, you will come up with my reported results, unless someone else has re-run the analysis since I did. Accordingly, some of the sites had a valuation number from previous assessments. All have decreased in value since the most recent previous valuation; e.g., ElectronicsWeekly.com went from $51,264 on 3/12/2015, to $25,378 on 3/10/2017. That is mostly likely due to a continual obsolescence of the calculator algorithms, not a real decrease in domain value. Magazine domains seem to be grossly undervalued. For instance, Microwave Journal is valued at only $9,063 per SitePrice.org. Try to buy it for that much! RFCafe.com comes in at $79,654, and there is no way I would sell for less than half a million. There was no previous valuation of RFCafe.com, BTW, so I am not just saying that because it happened to RF Cafe.

Academy of Model Aviation = $ 1,136,819

1)  Note: An attempt to rank some websites resulted the following warning (in bright red text). In order to be able run the algorithm, it was first necessary to get the domain cleared by their Adult Website Checker, which I did, thereby anointing those websites for future analysis.

"Because of adsense policies our system cannot publish this domain. This domain may have been marked as inappropriate for children on mcafee siteadvisor, opendns, mywot or our manuel check. If you're the webmaster of the domain and sure that it doesn't include any restricted content which will cause violation of adsense please first check it on Adult Website Checker and if not fixed you can contact us at support@siteprice.org. Please fix it and try it again on siteprice.org to calculate its worth."

...and now for the sales pitch. If your company can benefit from RF Cafe's typical page view count of 15,000-20,000 each weekday, please take a quick look at my Advertising Information page. You simply will not find a less expensive venue for the amount of exposure. You might also review the inexpensive software and other products I have created over the years. This is my sole source of income, so anything you can do to help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Posted March 10, 2017

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