It is common knowledge that web site value estimators are horribly inaccurate. If you don’t intend to use their results to market your website however, it is still fun to see what value they assign to your site. Most likely we’ve all taken one of these estimators for a test drive. Today I did just that, using this domain and I discovered that this site is worth 1,714 USD. I highly doubt, however, that I can go and find someone willing to pay that much for this site, not that I would do such a thing, nor am I claiming that this site doesn’t have worth.

One reason I doubt this is for the simple fact that this site was designed by me, its full of my writing, and every aspect of it is designed to suit my purpose. Even the domain name is derived from my last name. There is another reason, however. Two days ago, using the same estimator and the same domain it spit out a much different number: 78. Did my website suddenly explode over the last two days? The answer is yes and no. A short time after I used the estimator I released two wordpress plugins back to back. This resulted in a large spike in traffic. This spike, however, will wear off in a few days. Though I will likely see an increased level of traffic from what it was before this happened, it won’t be as high as it was on release day.

So what does this mean? The estimator most likely picked up on the elevated amount of traffic over the last few days and judged the value of this site based on that (and other factors of course). Never mind that maybe only a dozen people will read this article, and never mind that only two days ago the estimate was two orders of magnitude lower, I can now turn around and sell this site for a thousand bucks.

Before you get too excited about the value one of these things assigns to your website you should remember that they employee a discrete algorithm. This algorithm obviously cannot determine the value of the content of your website. In the real world, the content of your website plays a much larger role in determining its value. While it is important to take other factors into account, leaving out the content factor makes any estimate worthless.