How accurate are the website appraisal companies
After reading the article about bankrate.com buying creditcardguide.com for $32 million cash plus $2 million in working capital, I wanted to do some research on creditcardguide.com to find out what secrets the website might have done to command such a price.
While searching through Google for sites that contain the text creditcardguide.com an interesting site popped up. The website is websiteoutlook.com and the direct link to credit card guide.com is http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.creditcardguide.com. At the time of this writing the website is estimated to be worth $52,786.30. Well, it looks like the accuracy of this website is quite a bit off, unless it’s correct, and bankrate doesn’t know what they’re doing. No, I doubt that. So after seeing that, I thought I would check some more domain appraisals on the website credit card guide.com.
Here are some of the results
- cubestat.com – $49,342.89
- websitevaluecalculator.com – $119 (Note this is with them displaying a pr of 5 and over 3 million backlinks)
- smartpagerank.com – $919
Obviously the value of the website cannot be judged by a simple instant online appraisal script, and probably not by a firm. With the traffic, back links, page rank, and length of the domain name, I don’t think there is a online appraisal company out there that would even pay $1 million for this domain name. So basically, an online appraisal company is more of a novelty and something that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Who knows your new website mynewwidgetwebsite.com might show up as being worth over $1 million someday, or he might be less than $100, either way all you website owners out there, good luck on your websites, and hopefully you’ll be the next big acquisition by a large corporation.