How to value a content website or blog

Price is roughly a year's profit times a multiple. FE International, which brokers website sales, puts most private online businesses between 3 and 10 times yearly earnings in 2026. Content sites, blogs and newsletters usually land in the lower to middle part of that range.¹ Its own example is a site with $240,000 of yearly profit at 3.5 times, which comes to $840,000, or about 42 months of profit.¹

Sites paid by subscribers or members tend to get the higher multiples. Sites living on ads and affiliate links get the lower ones.¹ If you need help getting the profit figure right, with the owner's own pay and one-off costs, our guide to valuing an app that makes money goes through it line by line.

Split the income into ads, affiliate commissions, sponsored posts and anything else. Each one carries a different risk.

Ads are the easiest to check. Google says AdSense publishers get 80% of the revenue after the advertiser platform takes its fee, or about 68% when the advertiser buys through Google Ads, and that the share is the same wherever the publisher is.² So a blog run from Ibadan gets the same cut as one run from London. What changes the earnings is who reads it and what they read about, so look at which countries the readers come from.

Affiliate income can move overnight. In May 2026, Adweek reported that Amazon had cut commission rates for some affiliates by as much as half, and told them through their account managers rather than in a public announcement.³ If one programme pays most of the bills, treat that income as less certain.

Sponsored posts often depend on the owner's own contacts. The brand that pays ₦150,000 a post because it likes the founder may not stay when the founder leaves. Ask for the invoices, and ask which sponsors have agreed to keep working with a new owner.

Don't price a site from screenshots. Ask the seller to add you to Google Search Console, which an owner does under Settings, then Users and permissions. A restricted user can see the Performance report without being able to change anything.⁴

Look at clicks over the longest period it shows. Is the line steady, climbing or sliding? Does one page bring half the visits? A site whose income rests on a single article about JAMB results or a visa process is a much riskier buy than one with a hundred pages each doing a little.

Google changes how it ranks pages several times a year, and content sites feel it first. With its March 2024 core update, Google said it wanted to show less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks.⁵ At the same time it named expired domain abuse as spam, which means buying an old domain and filling it with low-value pages to borrow its rankings.⁵

So check the domain's past on the Wayback Machine. If it was a church's website in 2019 and became a phone review blog last year, ask why. FE International notes that buyers pay more for sites that held their traffic through recent updates, and that AI answers now appear on around one in ten searches in the US.¹ Ask the seller for Search Console exports that show traffic through those update months.

Most of the traffic coming from Google search.

One page, one affiliate programme or one sponsor carrying the income.

A site that is really its owner, with the owner's face, voice and name on everything.

Hundreds of thin pages that exist only to catch searches.

Income or traffic falling over the last six to twelve months.

An email list, a WhatsApp channel or a lot of people typing the address in directly. FE International gives the example of a site with 45% of its visits from email and direct traffic moving up the range.¹

A second kind of income, like a paid membership next to the ads.

Writers on contract and written steps for how a post gets published, so the site runs without the seller.

Age, and a steady record through good years and bad.

Say a Nigerian tech blog earns ₦600,000 a month from ads and ₦150,000 from sponsored posts. Hosting costs ₦20,000 a month and a writer costs ₦130,000. Profit is ₦600,000 a month, or ₦7.2 million a year.

Now the risks. About 80% of visits come from Google, and the sponsors are friends of the owner who haven't agreed to stay. A careful buyer would take the sponsor money out, leaving ₦450,000 a month, or ₦5.4 million a year. At 2.5 to 3 times, that blog is worth roughly ₦13.5 million to ₦16.2 million. If the sponsors sign on with the new owner, the price can go back up.

On Prow: Posting a project on Prow is free, and so is proving revenue. Verified revenue on Prow comes from a read-only Stripe connection, so for ad or affiliate income, ask the seller for live access to those dashboards as well. A website has to pass an ownership check before it can be listed, through a DNS record, a tag on the homepage or a file on the site. Listing costs a one-off ₦10,000 for Early-stage or ₦25,000 for Basic. When it sells, buyer and seller each pay 1.5%, at least ₦5,000 each, and the money is held in escrow with EscrowPay, whose fee is split between them.

• You've worked out 12 months of real profit, owner's pay included.
• You know how much comes from ads, affiliates and sponsors.
• You've seen the traffic yourself in Search Console.
• You've checked the domain's history and how it did through Google updates.
• You've moved the multiple down for each risk and up for traffic the site owns.
• The money goes through escrow.