NEWS: The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs

1.The Gawker Properties: $150 million. Gawker, ValleyWag, Gizmodo, Wonkette, and a number of smaller websites. The company claims 30 million monthly unique visitors. According to audience measurement service Quancast, that number is fairly close. Compete shows that traffic to most of the large sites in the group more than doubled from a year ago. If the sites generate one-and a-half page views per unique visitor and the total CPM value of the multiple advertisers on each page is $20, Gawker is an $11 million business which is still growing quickly. The company does not appear to be staff-heavy, so it is imaginable that the margins on the business are 50%.  Would the business be worth 15x revenue or 30x operating profits? Could be.

2.MacRumors: $85 million.Blog knows more about Apple than Apple management does. It ranks No. 2,700 in Alexa. Compete shows 544,000 visitors and moving up quickly. Quantcast puts global unique visitors at 5.3 million. Page views at 33 million, which seems a bit high. Advertising looks high-end and solid, probably at least $30 per page CPM.  Business should do at least $12 million and have a high margin, estimated at 60%. At a 12x multiple.

3.Huffington Post: $70 million. Several websites commented that HuffPo might be worth $100 million when it raised $5 million late last year. Arianna Huffington said to Portfolio that the business was in the process of becoming profitable. In late 2007 management claimed that the website had 4 million unique visitors per month and would bring in $7.5 million for the year. The website is now in the top 1,000 according to Alexa and its ranking has been climbing, probably due to the election. Compete shows a similar trend with the website reaching over 1.8 million people in February, up 245% from the same month last year. The problem with the business now is that its value has probably peaked. The huge increase in visitors is likely to fall-off once the election is over. HuffPo has tried to building out other content sections, but it is likely that they cannot replace the visits from the core audience which visits the site for political comment. That means that the company will have all of the costs (40 or 50 people) and a falling number of visitors.  Revenue should actually begin to fall in 2009. With a business which is likely to shrink next year, it is hard to believe that the company is worth more than 10x revenue.

4.PerezHilton, 5.TechCrunch, 6-7. (tied) Ars Technica, Seeking Alpha, 8-10. Drudge Report, Mashable, GigaOm, 11. Boing Boing, 12. Silicon Alley Insider, 13. ReadWriteWeb, 14. Paidcontent.org, 15-16. Search Engine Land, Smashing Magazine, 17. DListed, 18.Daily Blog Tip, 19-20. Techdirt, Neatorama, 21-22. BuddyTV, The Superficial, 23. Talking Points Memo, 24. Travelpod, 25. 24/7 Wall St.

Mostly high tech and media focused.