Comps ground your valuation in reality
A profit multiple gives you a number, but comparable sales — what similar sites actually sold for — tell you whether that number is realistic. Comps are the closest thing to a market price in an illiquid market, so they're the essential reality check on any valuation. Whether you're buying or selling, anchoring to real recent sales keeps you from pricing in a fantasy either direction.
What makes a good comp
A useful comparable matches your site on the factors that drive value: similar site type and niche, similar monetization, a similar profit level, and a comparable traffic and revenue profile. A recent sale matters more than an old one, since multiples shift over time. The closer the match on these dimensions, the more weight the comp deserves — a sale of a wildly different site tells you little about yours.
Use sold prices, not asking prices
The single most important rule: use what sites actually sold for, not what they were listed at. Asking prices are often optimistic and prove nothing; a listing that sat unsold at a high price is evidence of overpricing, not value. Sold data — available through marketplace sold listings and industry reports — is what reflects real buyer behavior. Anchor to transactions that closed, and treat aspirational asks with skepticism.
Apply them as a range, not a point
Comps rarely give one exact answer; they give a range. Gather several relevant recent sales, see where your site's quality places it within that range, and use it to validate or adjust your multiple-based valuation. If your calculated value sits wildly outside the comparable range, revisit your assumptions. Used as a sanity-checking range rather than a single magic number, comps turn a theoretical valuation into a defensible, market-grounded price.
Where the figures come from, and how much to trust them
Completed marketplace listings are the most useful source, because a sold price is a fact rather than an aspiration. Broker year-in-review reports give averages by category, useful for orientation and useless for a specific site. Public disclosures exist where a buyer is listed or a deal is newsworthy, and those tend to be far larger than the sites this applies to. Everything else circulating in forums and social posts is self-reported, unverified, and biased toward the sales worth boasting about. Rank your sources by whether the number was ever independently confirmed, and weight them accordingly.
Adjust the comparable toward your site
A comparable is a starting multiple that you then move for every material difference, and the direction is usually predictable. Higher traffic concentration than the comp, adjust down. More diversified revenue, adjust up. Shorter history, adjust down. Fewer owner hours and better documentation, adjust up. Declining trend against a flat comp, adjust down and consider whether the comparable is usable at all. Write each adjustment down with its reason, because a valuation built from comps is only as defensible as the reasoning between the comp and your number.
A worked example
Suppose a comparable affiliate site sold at 34x monthly profit on $2,500 a month, giving $85,000. Your site also earns $2,500, so the naive answer is $85,000. Then the differences: eighty percent of your revenue comes from one affiliate program where the comp had four, and you have nine months of history where the comp had three years. Both are material and both point the same way. Adjusting down to 26x to 29x gives $65,000 to $72,500. That is a $15,000 reduction from a comp that matched on model, scale and profit, which is a fair illustration of how little the headline match is worth on its own.
The published record is a selection of successes
Only completed sales get published. Sites that were listed and never sold leave no trace, so the visible record is drawn entirely from the deals that worked, and it overstates what a typical site achieves. This matters when you're setting an expectation from a handful of sold listings: you're looking at the survivors of a process that quietly discards a large share of everything listed. Treat the published figures as the upper part of a distribution whose lower half was never recorded.
- Comps are the market-reality check on any valuation.
- Good comps match type, niche, monetization, and profit — recently.
- Use sold prices, never optimistic asking prices.
- Apply comps as a range to validate or adjust your number.
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