Ask HN: How to obtain a semi-accurate appraisal of a business entity?
Hello, all,

I have a question that we've been struggling with recently:

Do you know of any known, established official (or even completely unofficial) useful metric by which a brand or website, or a web application, or perhaps even something like (what I refer to as a) 'business entity' (such as an LLC or Sub-S Corp, for instance) can be appraised of it's worth?

For instance, say that when you re-brand a business entity's website by investing several thousand dollars into graphic design services, or otherwise "upgrade" a site by investing an equivalent amount of money or sweat equity, what are some ideas for establishing ballpark figures for:

A. How much the re-branding initiative costs overall,

B. Approximately what you consider the business (or website) to be 'worth' before the project,

and,

C. What the business (or website) is subsequently valued at after the investment in rebranding.

My firm is currently dabbling in a very low-tech method by which we can fairly and accurately establish reasonable estimates of site/brand/business valuations, and we're having a tough time because many of the projects we are involved with are much smaller than the established market journals recognize. (i.e. I'm pretty sure that TechCrunch won't run an article on the last website we built, because it was a pretty cookie-cutter site for a large national law firm, and subsequently of little to no interest, even though we were adequately compensated in our opinion)

We feel that although our sites aren't standard "startup" fare, (or at all even slightly interesting to the hardcore developers of HN) the sites in question hold considerable value for their owners, even if they are not massively popular like TwitBookSpaceGoogPokerStarzWhatEver is; they generally get steady streams of high-quality, discerning visitors that are sincerely interested in the content, they don't have a lot of overhead in terms of hosting or server hardware, they have solid, recognizable logos, typography, & content, consistent and acceptably "catchy" brandnames and/or domain names, and aren't shabby on Web 2.0 functionality like tag clouds, social networking widgets, & regularly updated content that auto-refreshes the site when the owners get too busy to post original work.

(Some of our other projects are actually pretty cool, like Perl/Catalyst-based user-submission driven news sites similar to Reddit or HN, but assisted in content gathering and refreshing by a bunch of Perl/Plagger modules, but I digress...)

So, anyway: I hope this isn't something that's been covered extensively in the past (if it was, I missed it, sorry) but I think these are interesting questions as not all web developers aspire to build the next Big Thing.

Do you have any advice?

What do you do, when a business person who owns a website asks you to place a value on the website, or, (to make it even more complicated), do you get asked to appraise, say, businesses who own not just one domain, but rather, collect 'portfolios' of websites and operate them under the corporate umbrella provided by the primary (typically incorporated) business entity?

Maybe the best way to phrase a question of this nature would be to say, "How does Y Combinator make semi-accurate, ballpark-ish guesstimates when evaluating the value of the smaller projects they fund?"

(which also then leads to the question, "Um, I'm not trying to compete with Y Combinator here or anything, but, uh, if a hypothetical company was trying to compete with PG, uh, what's a good equation to use to evaluate sunk costs and stuff?"

Don't laugh - I'm really curious about this stuff.)