how do you put a value on the user of a site such as facebook? or even more so on plentyoffish.com? I'm number crunching a marketing strategy for a startup and wondering where i could find information on the return per user for big name sites? or is this confidential?
You're basically asking "What's the net present value of the user?".<p>Let's say that the average user clicks 1 ad per day, and you get 5 cents per click, then each user is worth 5 cents per day. 5 cents * 365 = $18.25 in revenue per customer per year.<p>What's your cost? If you're paying $300k / year in salaries, Red Bull, website hosting and office rent to support a website that can handle 20,000 customers, then the cost per customer per year is $15.00.<p>...so your profit is $3.25 per customer per year.<p>What's the churn rate? If an average user lasts 2 years, then you're getting $6.50 in total profit per customer.<p>...except the profit for year two should be "discounted" by some factor (inflation, opportunity cost, risk, etc.). Call the first year $3.25 and the second year $2.50, perhaps.<p>So: a new customer is worth $5.75.<p>You can see all of the variables I used above - feel free to substitute your own numbers in.
Start at your planned 'revenue event' and work your way backwards to your expected traffic volumes.<p>For example, if you have a plan to build a site with users and content, and your revenue plan is to sell T-shirts;<p>- What percentage of checkout pages will be completed?<p>- What percentage of tshirt page visitors will click the 'buy now' button?<p>- What percentage of site visitors will click your promo to view the tshirt page?<p>- How often will your users visit your site?<p>- How many users will you have?<p>Selling Tshirts isn't the best revenue model, but you can follow these steps to build a model for anything.