@ zazai: No way. :O Is that based purely on the concept of "high traffic means high exposure to net advertisements"? Or is there something else which factors in to legitimize the value? I don't doubt that Akiba-Online gets its fair share of traffic, but I have a hard time believing it's so much traffic as to justify a value of 14 million dollars. Are the one thousand lurkers plus the one hundred regular members seriously worth that much (in ad revenue) to the ad companies? O_o If this is to be believed, though, then (a) congrats chompy, and (b) holy shit. o_o
@ handyman: yeah, seriously. o_o;
As for my own observations, ...
according to this bizinformation website, Akiba-Online is a major contender with other more-notoriously-highly-trafficked websites!
Seriously? Seriously? I have a hell of a hard time believing that Facebook is worth that much, let alone that it would be worth nine to ten times as much as Amazon.com. :\ Now I'm really starting to think that this site places a heavy emphasis on advertisement exposure. And since chompy's website has a shitton of porno ads all over the place, that's probably why the value is as high as it says it is.
If my theory is right, then check out Wikipedia: no ads, and it's still netting that much thereotical "potential net traffic ad revenue". Dayuuuuuuuuuuuumn. Just goes to show how much traffic Wikipedia gets! lol
And then some other websites of (personal ;p :)) interest: CNN = $371.40 million Nico Nico Douga = ¥10.5 billion (so roughly $105 million) Hongfire = $11.65 million (HAH!) xkcd = $11.39 million Anime News Network = $10.38 million Serebii = $8.82 million Pokemon.com = $5.78 million Bulbapedia = $5.32 million Monash University = $6.48 million (most of which, I am 99% certain, must be due to Jim Breen's WWWJDIC :)) Penny Arcade = $5.75 million
According to the website, Akiba-Online gets one-tenth the traffic of Penny Arcade but is worth over twice, and nearly three times, its value. Oh, the power of ads. :P
Pardon the double post, but I did a little more research, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don't think this site is accurately reflecting the net worth of domain names. Here's why:
1. Last I checked, the cost to register a domain name for one year was somewhere around $70.
2. We know that all domain names are not created equal. Gibberish names like 56aq22dnj4a are worth less than non-gibberish domain names like bluetowel or vanillapine, and those domain names are in turn worth less than the (obviously already-scooped-up) domain names for commercial products like charmin.com or clorox.com. If you name your site "pokemonchampions.com", it's going to be more likely to be seen than if you name it "9nssjr5594smddslsdlditro.com". Besides, nobody wants to type that nonsense in, but words are easy to remember and people don't mind typing in 20, 30 characters all that much so long as they understand what it is that they're typing.
So given these two observations, check this out:
www.ujhcp.com has a reported worth of $2,826.80. That is grossly inflated by my estimates. It should only be worth $70: period. It's a gibberish domain name for a site that doesn't exist. How can a site that doesn't even exist have thousands of dollars worth of value?
bluetowel.com is at least not gibberish, but lo and behold it's worth ever so slightly less: $2,763.80.
It doesn't get much better with one-letter off domain names. Some of them are over-inflated, and others seem to be barely above the baseline pricepoint of 2,000-odd dollars.
So, here's my recommendation: divide any of the figures you see by at least a factor of 35 (since $2,500 as an average divided then by 35 produces $70, the cost to register a new domain name) and that should give you a slightly more accurate result.
So ...
Akiba-Online's $14.57 million divided by 35 would be about $416,285. That's still respectable, but it's by no means "retire to the Maldives" material. It's enough to buy a nice home in up-front cash and cover the real estate tax costs for maybe the next 5 to 10 years, and that's about it. It's enough to pay off your college loans, buy a car, and put a down payment down on a house.
The other thing is ... these values are sort of like stock values. They're all theoretical. They all presume that you can find an interested buyer to whom you can sell your property. Akiba-Online isn't genuinely worth $400,000 or $14,000,000 to chompy just yet: it's worth whatever cash-in-hand ad revenue he gets minus the costs he incurs from server fees and whatnot. It'd only be worth 6, 7, or 8 figures if he could find somebody willing to buy it and could clinch the sale. That's a mighty big assumption even in times of loose spending, but in today's economy I think it's bordering on asinine-ridiculous. Nobody is going to pay $14 million for this site. Why would you pay $14 million only to turn around and find yourself saddled with forum maintenance, server issues, etc. and all for nickels and dimes you get from ad revenue? :\ Anybody who bought A-O for $14 million would turn right around and sell it to the next guy in line, and so on and so forth.
And I'm not saying that to put down A-O. I'm saying this is true for any domain which isn't attached to a nationally or internationally-famous brand name. Oprah Winfrey's existence makes oprah.com have intrinsic net value well in excess of tens of thousands of dollars -- simply because she's got rich enough, fanatic enough of fans who would be willing to pay that much to own oprah.com. Likewise, clorox.com has intrinsic value -- because you can bank on somebody being really bored on summer day and going on Google and typing in "clorox" to see what comes up and then visiting your site. leonardodicaprio.com, playstation.com, marbles.com, etc. These are domain names which already have value even with no site to back them up. But a name like "Hongfire" or "Akiba-Online" or "Serebii" or "xkcd" or (etc etc) has no value on its own. Its only value stems from the material on the site and the traffic which that material attracts.
In other words ... the domain name "Akiba-Online" isn't what's worth all that money. The traffic the domain name witnesses is what's worth the money. That's what a guy would theoretically be paying for if he bought A-O off of chompy: he'd be paying for us. He'd be banking on us staying here despite change of ownership and any possible change of rules that might come with it. And he'd be banking on the ad companies still saying, "Yeah, these folks are worth a lot of money." Which they could always change their minds about at any time without warning. Especially since more and more people are finding out just how easy it is to browse the Internet with ads disabled -- pop-ups, banner ads, the whole schebang.
This isn't really a news story. 14 mil is a ridiculous figure. Website valuation has little to do with counting unique hits, and more about calculating future earnings. A buyer will always pay a priced based on expected future returns. Akiba-Online is not a business, and it doesn't have a cashflow, except for the ad revenue which is miniscule. Not to mention the fact that this site revolves around pirated content. Putting this site up for sale wouldn't net more that a few thousand dollars, I bet. To get more money, it would have to be transformed into a money-maker first.
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To evaluate any businesss, you gotta see their financial statements, monthly and yearly. There you'll see how much they're raking in and how much their cost are. Investors then see if it is worth to take the plunge.
Take for example, if a website makes a total of 10K/month in profit. That's $120,000 a year. An investor wants to see how long it takes for his investment to return. $120K x 10 years, for example, and he'll only get $1.2M back from the $14M he invested. We don't need to calculate anymore to know that this wouldn't be a wise investment. Or course, some investors are willing to lose money if they get something that is the mega popular. Akiba-O got hit by another thing - Porn. That's right. What makes Akiba-O popular is never ready forthe public. It's not something that a big company like to said they purchase a porno site.
Akiba-O shouldn't waste time thinking of selling Akiba-O. But think of how to delegate jobs and start hiring people to run the show. Keep good financial statements, etc...
Oh by the way, all this talk about website making $$ is making me drool. I coded an online accounting website but never place it online. Maybe it is time to work out the kinks in it and register a domain.
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What TokyoToshokan = $13.48 million???
TokyoToshokan isn't very hard to code. In fact, it's really simple. I rather dump the accounting stuff and maintain a simple website like TT. But all that lawsuits just scare me.
Wow..Popular
