Evaluating How Much a Google Adsense Site is Worth

There's been a few threads at Webmasterworld over the last few weeks discussing how to value a website in order to sell it. The most recent is asking how much a Google Adsense site that generates $20/day in revenue is worth. It has over 1000 pages of content. The seemingly accepted calculation for this sort of thing is either 10 months' or 1 years' earnings, give or take a little bit. At $20 a day, your site is making $7300 a year, which according to the "consensus", is what the site should sell for.

I haven't sold a site lately, but when I did, I didn't look at the earnings. This was probably a big mistake, both on my part, and on the webmaster's part who bought it. It wasn't an Adsense site though, just an affiliate site, and I wasn't making a lot of money from it. But I think I sold it for cheap.

The other interesting conversation about selling a website is in the members' only section of Webmasterworld. "Kellyandsummer" were looking to sell a site that was making almost all of its money from pay per click arbitrage with Google and Overture. I'll not spill the beans on the thread, since you're supposed to have to pay to have access to the information in that section of the forum, but it's good reading, and definitely gets you thinking. Motivated me, anyway.