dailypixel

Here We Go Again - How Much Are 'Eyeballs' Worth?

For those who may be unfamiliar with Om Malik, he is a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine and has his own well-read personal blog focusing on broadband, VoIP and nextgen internet technologies. I'm a little late with this, but a few days ago Om penned an article for Business 2.0 titled "The Return of Monetized Eyeballs". For those of us who were pitching, involved and/or actually running web businesses around the dot-bomb era, the term 'eyeballs' should elicit a heavy dose of deja vu. In the article Om paints a pretty rosey financial picture for web publishers who are able to garner substantial monthly traffic numbers. Overall, the tone of the piece is a very positive one, and why shouldn't it be? Everything from online usage to broadband penetration is on the rise, and consequently the online advertising market is sizzling with advertisers that want to spend money, and a growing list of ways for publishers of all kinds to get their piece of the pie. But it was Om's suggested valuation of $38 USD per monthly visitor that touched off some good debate in the blogosphere.

Based on recent high-profile Web content deals, the value of a unique monthly website visitor currently hovers around $38 (the average purchase price per unique user of acquisitions during the past year).

I wish Om was right. The Dailypixel Network barely 6 months old would be worth well over a million, if he was. But not too long after Om published that article, Jason Calacanis chimed-in with his take on the $38/visitor valuation. You just gotta love blogs - an article gets published, and in a matter of hours, one of the biggest stakeholders and leaders in your industry is there to offer up his honest opinion on it.

Om... you know I love you, but this is absurd. Like really, really crazy. Weblogs, Inc. was bought by AOL because of revenue and revenue growth. Eyeballs and pageviews had nothing to do with it--zero. No one in the marketplace is buying things based on eyeballs--no one. It's all based on revenue. Well... we also had an amazing management team and systems in place--those are very important too.

However, no one--NO ONE--is paying $38 per web user because no one--NO ONE--has any hope of ever making that kind of money back! I can't comment on specifics of our deal, but let me just say this is really, really flawed.

Om's valuations may be a tad unrealistic, and Jason may be looking at this through AOL glasses, but I have to say the best line of all does indeed rest with Calacanis when he states;

"And build a brand. Because without that, you're going nowhere."

TAGS: advertising, networks, traffic
POST TOOLS: