First up, I’m truly saddened by what’s happened to investors of The Income Store (TIS). For a round up of what occurred, check out the write-up by Jon over at Website Income.
On her latest video (below), Emilia Gardner found out that the Receiver had published a PDF on the incomestorereceivership.com site listing all the domains that TIS owned and asked if someone was going to help evaluate the sites.
I was able to extract the URLs from the publicly available document, enter them into the Batch Analysis tool of Ahrefs (at 200 a time, that was fun) and exported their search traffic data.
I assumed that the sites’ pageviews are 2x the search traffic shown in Ahrefs (somewhat conservative) and that the sites on average achieved a $20 RPM (revenue per 1000 pageviews).
An RPM of $20 is on the high end for advertising but very low for affiliate, where Amazon associate sites tends to average between $80-$150 (and software review sites can achieve over $1000 RPM) so I feel it’s the best representation (although open to hear other people’s thoughts in the comments).
In total, the 3012 domains I analysed (I removed example.com and udemy.com from the list) currently bring in 4,502,640 visitors from search a month.
At a $20 RPM that translates into $180,106 income per month.
And at a 30x multiple (in the Empire Flippers 2019 report the average sold multiple was 29x so I’ve increased it by one to be conservative) that translates to a total portfolio value of $5,403,168.
The highest traffic site had 281,073 search traffic a month and was monetized through advertising so knowing this we can place a (somewhat conservative) $10 RPM on it, so at 2x pageviews we can assume it’s generating $5-6k per month for a value around $170k.
The second highest traffic site is an amazon associates site bringing in 246,792 search visits a month. It has a large number of posts targeting best X for Y keywords and we can assume it’s (someone conservatively) making $100 RPM. This translates to a site making ~ $50k/m and worth ~ $1.5MM.
I noticed that the 4th biggest traffic site at 173,408 search visits a month didn’t seem to have any ads on it, i.e. didn’t look monetized, so this is where taking an average of $20 RPM as a rough total portfolio valuation seems to hold up ok.
To properly value the portfolio, you would need access to historic earnings.