And you missed the method of the calculation entirely. I never implied that the visitors had value of any kind, I merely compared two different ways of getting those visitors. One way was with original content – what we did. The other way is to pay for those visitors via Adwords – what we didn’t do. I merely calculated how much it would cost to get the same traffic gains from an adwords campaign. Very simple.

I’m fairly certain neither of you read all of my post.

1000 page views of content website are worth something like $2-$3 in advertising revenues. Therefore your blog is worth somegthing like $25 a month. By the way, if you post more often the marginal value of posts will be smaller since if you had advertising the same people will see the same ads again and again and they are not very likely to click them.

Traffic to a content site, on the other hand, is worth nothing by itself. Readers are there because they’re interested in the content; if the site were selling something, the readers would not be there. There is arguably value in goodwill created, potential clickthroughs to ads, etc. but that’s a far cry from just tallying up $.70/visit.

Another way to look at it: if it’s not possible to convert those visits directly into the claimed value (i.e. redirect all of them to an advertiser paying $.70/visit), the comparison is invalid.

This reminds me of the fallacy that if someone makes $100k/year, their time spent at home on hold with the cable company is worth $50/hr. No, their time at home has the same financial worth as the local McDonald’s employees when they’re at home: NOTHING.