I knew this day would come sooner or later. Actually, I am quite surprised that it took this long for this to happen, but a blog has finally been sold by the owner and scooped up by another. The blog in question is Ensight.org run by Jeremy C. Wright.
To be honest I only know of this blog because I read over at the Sitepoint forums and he seems to be a very popular guy. I came across a thread where he was discussing the possibility of selling his blog and of course my interest was piqued.
I visited his site to see what all the hoopla was about. Numbers were being thrown around of people offering $2,500-$4,000 to purchase the site. Many people in the forums commented how they saw this as being a ridiculously high number just for a blog, but they forget that a blog is also a website. Seeing how Jeremy's blog is well established and contains PR and inbound links then what makes it so different than any other established site?
In the end it looks like the offer he settled on was around $15,000 which includes monthly payments for him to continue to write. Now the question is was this worth it for either Jeremy or the buyer? Let's take a look.
According to Jeremy this is what the site currently has:
Now the problem with offering traffic stats for your blog is that it's hard to take into account the people that read the feeds on your site. FeedBurner offers a service that will better allow you track the stats on your feeds.
In any case the stats aren't that bad. Anything over a 100,000 pageviews should be considered the start to a successful blog.
Jeremy states that he pulls in $200/month from his blog and has had offers for higher rates in advertising. So if you look at it from this perspective you can get your money back in almost a year's time if you stuck with $200/month (not including server costs and whatnot), but if a site is already making money there should be a way to make even more money. So this makes me think Jeremy is on the losing end of this situation.
From what I gather by reading other's opinions is that what make Jeremy's site so successful is Jeremy so without him the site isn't going to be as successful. Now the deal looks to be a loss for both parties.
Remember though that the deal includes monthly payments to Jeremy to continue writing, but seeing how the deal is limited to $15,000 then it seems Jeremy will only blog for a fixed amount of time. Not knowing the details of the complete deal makes this hard to tell whether if it was worthwhile for either party. However, if they can get the ad rates that Gruber is asking for then consider this deal a homerun, although it would be better if Jeremy kept the site himself and sold it later when he really was tired of it.
So in the end we still haven't figured out a formula to decide how much your blog is worth since there are so many factors involved, but one thing is for certain, there is money to be had in this game.
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Yeah, the 15,000$ is the whole package. However the sale price is also well above the 4K everyone's quoting :)
Btw, thanks for the link Scrivs, I agree with everything you've said. The media's starting to pick this up, so we'll see what everyone else thinks.
Jeremy C. Wright (http://www.ensight.org)
Glad you agree Jeremy. I was impressed by the way you handled the situation and congratulations on the sale. Too bad nobody ever makes me any offers :-)
Scrivs (http://9rules.com/)
The actual selling price could be read as too low, based on probable projected advertising and sponsored feed revenues. On the other hand, being the first seller of any new business model often results in a highly debatable price. Some startups in new industries, which is what a blog is in essence, sell well above or below the later "fair market value" as things shake out.
As for Jeremy continuing to work on his blog, it's very common practice in small business sales for the previous owner to continue to work in the business to retain the good will.
Wayne Hurlbert (http://www.blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com)
I've been writing a blog in a space which prohibits using it for commercial purposes, but would like to move it to a site which will allow me to sell subscriptions to it. Any advice? I'm a print journalist published in several actual, physical publications.
D. H. Kerby
#1
It was my understanding that Jeremy was going to continue to write for the site in exchange for a monthly salary.
Chris McMahon (http://citrusinteractive.com)