What’s Your Blog Worth?

Philip Liu proposes factors in assessing the sale value of a blog. You might not be selling your blog, but you should check how it performs against these factors.

1. Age – How long has the blog been in existence?
2. Quantity of posts – How many posts does the blog have?
3. Frequency of posts – How often is the blog updated?
4. Quality of posts – What is the relevance, currency and depth of the posts?
5. Design – How does the design relate to the content? Does the design convey the appropriate feelings for a visitor to the site? Is the design appropriate for the subject matter? Can the design be improved?
6. Monetization avenues – Has the site fully explored all monetization possibilities and revenue streams?
7. Personality – Does the content of the site convey a particular personality? Is that personality desirable and/or congruent with the future direction of the site?
8. Subscriber quantity – How many subscribers does the site have?
9. Subscriber loyalty – How likely are the subscribers going to continue after a change in ownership?
10. Subscriber growth – How likely am I able to grow the subscriber base after a change in ownership?
11. Cult of personality – How many of the subscribers are subscribers because of the person who is writing the blog posts and what are the costs should that person leave?
12. Statistics – What are the sources of the traffic the site receives?
13. Number of authors – How many writers are there for the blog? What are the opportunities for growing the blog by adding more authors after a sale?
14. Real costs – What are the current and future anticipated costs of running the blog?
15. Intangible costs – What are the non-out of pocket and opportunity costs you expect to incur to implement the above improvements? For example, what is your sweat equity worth?
16. Transferability of revenue streams – Are the revenue streams transferable to the new owner or do they go with the seller?
17. ROI timeframe – How fast do you expect a return on your investment?
18. Current revenue – How much does the blog take in on a monthly basis now?

Not all of us can sell a bunch of blogs for $25 million, but we can at least make sure our blogs consistently create value for our readers.

Ballmer Throws Chair at Third World for Low Vista Sales

See, this is what happens when you get lazy, delay your product, and lose your OS monopoly in a three-way battle with Linux and OS X. You start going nuts again.

Ballmer admitted to financial analysts that the predictions for Vista had proved ‘overly optimistic’ and he blamed the pirates in China, India, Brazil, Russia and other emerging markets.

He said his final solution would be to increase the intensity Windows Genuine Advantage as part of an effort to squeeze more revenue from developing nations.

Hey, Steve-o, here’s a hint: instead of making your DRM even more obtrusive to legitimate users, how about you actually give people really good reasons to give you wads and wads of their money? Even anime schoolgirls know how that works.