How much is a website's traffic worth?
The short answer
Traffic is worth what it can be monetised for, which varies by a factor of ten between sources. A content site with 25,000 monthly sessions and no advertising priced at $22,000 costs $0.88 per monthly session. Commercial search traffic can justify that; social referral traffic rarely does.
How much is a website's traffic worth?
Between roughly $0.20 and $1.50 per monthly session for an unmonetised content asset, decided by where the traffic comes from and what the visitor intends to do. The unit matters more than the headline price. Once you convert every asking price into cost per monthly session, sites that looked incomparable line up next to each other and the expensive ones become obvious.
Session volume on its own tells you almost nothing. Twenty-five thousand people reading product comparisons before buying something are worth several times twenty-five thousand people who arrived from a link aggregator and left in nine seconds.
What does $22,000 buy at 25,000 monthly sessions?
It buys each monthly session at $0.88, or roughly 7.3 cents per annual session at current volume. Take a content site with 25,000 monthly sessions, a few hundred published pages, no advertising and no affiliate links. Nothing has ever been asked of this audience, which is the reason it is priced this way and also the reason it might be worth buying.
The absence of advertising cuts both ways. It means the upside is untouched, and it means nobody has ever proved this traffic converts into anything.
Which traffic is worth the most?
Intent decides the rate, and source is the proxy for intent.
| Traffic source | Typical value per monthly session | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Search, commercial terms | $0.90 to $1.50 | The visitor is deciding what to buy, and advertisers pay to be there |
| Search, informational terms | $0.35 to $0.80 | Steady and indexable, but further from a transaction |
| Direct and email | $0.80 to $1.40 | Audience you keep rather than audience a platform lends you |
| Referral from other sites | $0.30 to $0.60 | Depends on somebody else's editorial decisions |
| Social and aggregators | $0.10 to $0.30 | Spiky, shallow, rarely returns |
A site whose sessions are 70% commercial search at $0.88 is priced sensibly. The same volume from social at $0.88 is priced at three or four times what it supports, and no amount of publishing will fix it quickly.
What would 25,000 sessions actually earn?
Enough to matter under two of three monetisation routes, and not enough under the third. The arithmetic is worth doing before you make an offer rather than after.
| Route | Assumptions | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | $12 session RPM | $300 | $3,600 |
| Affiliate placements | 2% click through to merchant, 3% conversion, $40 commission | $600 | $7,200 |
| Email capture and a product | 1.5% of sessions subscribe, list monetises at $0.60 per subscriber per month | $225 rising | $2,700 rising |
Display alone gives a six-year payback on $22,000, which is why buying traffic purely to put advertising on it is usually a poor use of $22,000. Affiliate revenue on commercial pages gets you to roughly three years. The email route starts slowest and is the only one of the three that compounds, because it builds an audience that a search engine cannot take back.
How do you check the traffic is real?
Get read access to the analytics property, not screenshots, and look at twenty-four months rather than twelve. You are checking four things: that the volume is stable, that it survived the platform updates in the period, that it is spread across many pages, and that the sessions behave like people. One page producing 40% of traffic is a concentration problem exactly as one customer producing 40% of revenue would be.
Then cross-check against a second source. Search console impressions and clicks should broadly agree with the analytics story, and a large gap between them is worth an explanation before you go further.
What is the traffic worth to a buyer who cannot monetise it?
Nothing, which is the part most pre-revenue pricing conversations skip. Traffic has no standalone value; it has value to an operator with a product to put in front of it, an affiliate relationship already in place, or an email list to fold it into. A buyer with none of those is paying for sessions and hoping.
The strongest position in this band belongs to someone who already operates in the category. If you run a site in the same niche, 25,000 sessions folded into an existing setup are worth considerably more than the same traffic standing alone, and you can pay more than the next buyer without overpaying.
When does a traffic asset start selling on a multiple?
When it has twelve months of collected revenue behind it, at which point content sites price at the conventional 1.5× to 3× trailing annual profit rather than on sessions. Take the $22,000 site to $7,200 a year of affiliate revenue at a $1,600 running cost, and you have $5,600 of trailing profit and a $8,400 to $16,800 valuation, which is less than you paid. Take it to $30,000 of annual profit and you are in a different conversation entirely.
That gap is the work, and it is why this band rewards operators rather than collectors. Sessions get you a seat. Revenue gets you a price.
Related: traffic-quality, how-much-is-a-content-site-worth, how-to-monetise-an-acquired-audience, cost-per-user
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