How much would you pay for HotJobs? How does $1,396,709,461 sound?
That’s a princely sum for the site considering competitor Monster.com is worth a paltry $7,188,176 while CareerBuilder.com, the No. 1 U.S. job board by traffic and revenue is valued at $10,090,838.
This bit of silliness comes from Valuate My Site, which purports to estimate the value of a website based on traffic, links, and some sort of secret sauce. Here’s how the site says it does its work:
“ValuateMySite.com uses different resources on the web combined with mathematical and statistical methods to estimate how many visits a website has. The site also analyzes available information on the Internet about a site to come up with a reasonable estimate for the site’s worth.”
Valuate My Site is one of several website valuation calculator sites that turn up with a Google search. MyWebsiteWorth values HotJobs at a more reasonable $500 million. Over at BuildReciprocalLinks.com CareerBuilder is worth $544 million. Finally, YourWebsiteValue puts Monster’s valuation at $7.8 million.
If it isn’t obvious that these valuations bear no resemblance to reality, consider that Monster Worldwide has a market cap of about $2.1 billion. That’s not necessarily a selling price, but it is a valuation based on what real people are actually paying per share.
Neither CareerBuilder nor HotJobs trade publicly, so a similar calculation can’t be done. However, when Gannett, one of four partners who own CareerBuilder, bought an additional 10 percent interest from the Tribune Company last year, it set CareerBuilder’s value at $1.35 billion.
Why would ValueMySite so badly skew the valuations of the three biggest U.S. job boards? Probably because the site’s algorithms can’t clearly distinguish Yahoo’s traffic from HotJobs and thus reports that the job site has something like 6.7 billion pageviews a day, while Monster gets 6.4 million and Careerbuilder gets 10.7 million.
comScore, which collects traffic data from actual server reports and proprietary counting methods, ranks CareerBuilder well ahead of HotJobs in unique visitors, a metric that actually has a bigger significance than pageviews.