What is a website worth?

Quantcast.com ranks Huffington Post as the 27th most visited website with 30.5 million monthly U.S. visitors and 39.5 million monthly global visitors. AOL is buying it for $315 million. Quantcast.com currently ranks ingrimayne.com, which contains the on-line Cybereconomics textbook, as the the 49,853rd most visited website with 30.9 thousand monthly U.S. vistors and 57.3 thousand global visitors. Both are Quantified, which means that more visits get recorded by Quantcast than would get recorded for sites that is not Quantified. Based on these numbers, ingrimayne.com is roughly 1000 times smaller than Huffington Post. Is it worth 0.1% of what Huffington Post is worth? Anyone willing to make such an offer will find a very receptive audience.

Update: AOL collects $250 million dollars each year from people who do not understand that it is free, but keep paying for it:

A friend of mine has an AOL e-mail address, so I called her and gently asked if she is still paying the AOL subscription fee.

“Well, yes, I like the service, and everybody already has my AOL address,” she said.

I tried explaining that all this is free, but I’m sure she was skeptical. How can something that’s valuable now be free?

AOL’s paid subscriptions are declining each year, down from about 8 million five years ago. Folks are getting the message, but not a certain group that basically doesn’t care to understand how the Internet works.