What is a content site worth?

The multiple is sold price ÷ trailing-twelve-month profit, so only the sites whose source page states a profit figure can be in it. That is the second figure above, and it is never larger than the first — usually far smaller, because most sold content sites are published with a price and no earnings at all.

The two ends of our content sample are genuinely different markets. At the bottom are small marketplace auctions — sites often only months old, sold for three and four figures, with the seller's own earnings screenshots as evidence. At the top are announced acquisitions of established publishers and course businesses, some traced to the buyer's own regulatory filings. Only the first kind routinely publishes profit, so the median is computed mostly from the auction end even though the deal count spans both.

A content site has no inventory, no suppliers and usually no staff. What changes hands is a traffic position and the arrangement that monetises it — which is why diligence here is almost entirely about whether both survive the transfer.

• Where the traffic comes from. Search, social, referral, email and direct decay at different rates when publishing stops. A single dominant source is a single point of failure.
• Whether the traffic is durable. Rankings that predate the last algorithm shift, and pages still ranking after it, are worth more than a spike that has not yet been tested.
• How it is monetised. Display ads, affiliate links, sponsorships and digital products differ in how stable and how verifiable they are — and in whether the buyer inherits the accounts or has to reapply.
• Whether the earnings can be shown live. Ad and affiliate networks pay from their own dashboards, so a screen-share of the account is available in a way that a store's supplier margin usually is not. A seller who will not show it is telling you something.
• Who owns the content. Freelance work without an assignment, syndicated material and licensed images are liabilities attached to the asset.
• The cost of keeping it alive. Hosting is trivial; refreshing content, maintaining links and replacing decayed pages is not. A site's profit is only as good as the work behind it that the buyer must now fund.

1. Ask which twelve months. A monthly earnings figure multiplied by twelve assumes a flat year — no seasonality, no trend, no lost ranking.
2. Ask whose profit. Content-site "profit" is usually revenue minus hosting, with the owner's writing and editing unpaid. Price in the work and the multiple changes.
3. Ask what the comparables were. Our numbers publish their sample size for this reason; a multiple quoted without one is an anecdote.
4. Use the middle of the range, not the top. The spread between the 25th and 75th percentile of comparable sales is a better negotiating position than any single figure.
5. Treat the multiple as a payback period. If you would not personally fund that many years of this site's decay curve, the multiple is wrong for it.