Friday, May 30, 2008

DanShanoff.com Is Worth $1.3 Million

So I was sent this blog post yesterday morning when it first came out, and I thought a few things to myself:

(1) If you want to attract attention to your blog, this is a good way to do it.

(2) HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Seriously, this was the most ludicrous thing I have ever seen in sports bloggery. Ever.

Start with DS.com being worth $1.3 million. I certainly would like to think so. And anyone who is interested in buying it for that much can feel free to contact me. But...come ON.

Then there are a few simple reality-checks: With Leather worth a measly $80K? EDSBS worth $30K? If that was the case, I would hope that any/ever mainstream sports site out there would be beating on Orson's door to acquire EDSBS, even at a 5X multiple of that particular valuation. Also, a site like SMQ (No. 14, directly behind DS.com) is already "owned" by a network (SB Nation), as is Deadspin and With Leather. How is that different from Fanhouse being owned by AOL? For some reason, TrueHoop was on the list (vastly undervalued, probably because its numbers didn't reflect the post-ESPN integration, which make it ineligible for the list anyway).

Here's a nice way to develop a real valuation, and it doesn't take a Harvard MBA to figure it out: If a blog is earning substantial monthly revenues ALREADY, it is worth a lot...and a lot more than those that aren't. And both those blogs are. (And, btw: I would say that Nick Denton would argue that Deadspin is worth a hell of a lot more than $16M.) There ain't many out there, and THAT is the good list you want to be on.

There is one potential ramification of the list: It was a nice little bit of rudimentary due diligence -- directionally ONLY -- about the most valuable sports blogs.

Any company (perhaps an ad network looking to increase its reach, its traffic and -- most importantly -- its "owned traffic") that wanted to own sports could bundle up all of those sites with sweet deals (and it wouldn't cost you $1.3M for blogs ranked at or near No. 13, I can tell you that much) and basically own the space.

What we really need -- here's a project for you, Jason Gurney -- is someone who can aggregate all of the monthly page views and unique visits totals of all those blogs and actually calculate the type of reach that the Top 100 sports blogs have every month, as compared to -- say -- newspapers or magazines or even mainstream sports sites.

(When you're doing that calc, Jason, don't forget to discount the page views and uniques of mainstream sports sites, the majority of whose content page views come from "commodity" content like AP stories, scoreboards, box scores, recaps and fantasy-team maintenance.)

Anyway, like I said: Anyone who wants to buy this blog for $1.3 million is welcome to it.

-- D.S.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'll give you $8.

Canadian.

JG said...

Wait, does this mean ballhype.com isn't worth $9.3 million, either?

We've actually been thinking about estimating traffic for top blogs ... Alexa's improved accuracy, calibrated with some of verified public sources that are out there (Site Meter, Quantcast, etc.), might produce something interesting.