How much is your blog worth? That’s an interesting question, and something AJ asked himself for sure, before selling Devlounge. There’s a ton of ways to calculate blog value, most of them focusing on Google PageRank and/or monthly revenue.

PageRank in particular is a bit tricky to calculate, especially with the most recent slam on sites selling text links. This means that a bunch of blogs more or less got their value halved.

Before I go on, let’s make one thing clear. Value is tricky, what a blog is worth in cold hard cash depends on if there’s a buyer for it. You can have any calculation in the world, no matter how great it is, it won’t be worth anything if nobody’ll want to pay up. TechCrunch is a very successful blog, but if there are no buyers it won’t be worth anything in the marketplace. It will, however, be worth something to the owner when it comes to revenue, and perhaps to the readership because of they making good use of the content. So a blog’s value is hard, let’s just leave it at that.

With PageRank being a somewhat flaky metric of late, bloggers are looking to other ways to value their blogs. 45n5 have a post up on valuing your blog from the number of subscribers, an interesting piece of data to take into account for sure. Darren Rowse follows up (and comments on a number of recent sales) with a list of other things to take into account, such as traffic, the blog’s profile in its niche, domain names, rankings, the archive, and so on.

Those are all interesting points, and definitely factors to take into account when valuing a blog. However, where’s the design in this? A good design is worth cold hard cash as well, at the very least if it’s a theme that you can release for promotion, or perhaps even sell. I’ve personally sold off themes I didn’t need anymore, for $500-1,000 and upwards.

Also, what about the brand? The blog’s position in the niche is all well and good, but what power and potential is built into the blog’s brand? If you could easily expand the business, building verticals, offering spin-off services, and so on, then that’s something that should be taken into account.

There are a lot of thing to consider. The only things I believe can be calculated on, however, is:

• Your traffic, as in unique visitors and pageviews.
• The community, as in registered users.
• The revenue, as in the average monthly revenue over a set period (6-12 months I’d say) of time.

The brand, the design, the nuisances taking over the blog (something I wrote about over at The Blog Herald by the way), and so on needs to be taken into account as well, but you can’t really but numbers on them, right?

Or maybe you can? I’d like to plug a $1,000 contest here, hosted by the new Devlounge owners, Splashpress Media, as a response to a video post on blog/site value by Loren Feldman. Easy money, right?

No, it’s not easy, of course, but do give it a go. Either way, it would be interested to hear how you value blogs and sites. The floor is open!