By Daniel Dessinger

May 30, 2008

Chances are, the answer is "not much." That's what we at CultureFeast.com discovered when we ran our domain name through the ultra sophisticated dnScoop. For those of you waiting with bated breath to know the value of our highly esteemed website, it's currently valued at a meager $12k. That's right. We're cheaper than a Chevy (God save us!).

If we are to believe dnScoop's estimations, Facebook and MySpace are each worth $1.2 billion, with Google at only $1.7 billion. Seems a bit out of balance. Yes, you're all wonderful companies hell bent on world domination, but Facebook is NOT in the same league as Google, is it?

Oops! Sorry, Google. Yahoo is worth $2.1 billion and MSN.com is worth $1.9 billion. Those damned portals! No worries. If it's any concession, Ask.com is only worth a supposed $51 million. Take THAT, you supposed innovators of search! 

So what are the factors that go into this farfetched estimation? 
That's a great question. Let's take a quick look at the publicized factors.

1) Domain Age
The older the domain is, the stronger search value it is likely to have as well as resale value.

2) PageRank
Yes, despite how many SEO "experts" say pagerank is meaningless, it still plays a factor here.

3) Inbound Links
The number of (quality) inbound links directly affects your website's ability to rank well in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live.

4) Alexa Traffic Report
Yes, only certain types of people use the Alexa toolbar and thus the numbers are guaranteed to be inaccurate. Still, it's one of the only ways to guess at a third party site's traffic.

5) Domain Name IP Report
Though we don't know exactly what dnScoop pulls from this, it is probably the fact that a large number of sites on the same IP indicates a lower quality score. 

6) Link Value Report
Ironically, Text Link Ads is the enemy of Google, yet somehow both search AND TLA values are combined to determine the values. Perhaps it's just a ploy to make affiliate revenue by referring a bunch of people to TLA. 

7) Site Category, Domain Keyword Popularity, and Number of Domain Name Occurrences on the Web
These were not mentioned in more detail, but are fairly self-explanatory. They're also looking at how often people mention the words in your domain name. This indicates either direct brand popularity or topic popularity. 

Now that we understand the criteria a little better, let's look at a few more popular websites worth mentioning:  

ESPN.com comes in at $658 million.
Craigslist.org is purported to be worth $614 million.
Amazon.com at $1.1 billion.
Ebay at $866 million.
Digg at $1.1 billion
Twitter at $43 million
SearchEngineLand at $2 million
NYTimes at $691 million
DoshDosh.com at $2 million

Heck, even Mark Cuban's own BlogMaverick is quoted at more than $2 million. Stinkin' billionaires.

Well, for now, we're keeping our twelve thousand dollar website and adding even more value. And don't even consider offering to buy. We won't sell 'til we're worth at least $14k

So, if you dare do the research, what's your site worth? We want to see too. Post your website name and dnScoop value in a comment below.  

**Disclaimer**
No, we're not going to actually sell CultureFeast.com for $14k. It's called "humor", people. 

© 2008 – 2010, Daniel Dessinger. All rights reserved.

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