How do you truly assess a website's value?

So, I have a website that I've been working on for the past year, and it has come out great. It's just about ready for full immersion in my niche.
I've spent a good 600-700 hours working on the 2000+ pages, and it's a very specialized site with a high potential for major traffic. I've not really advertised it at all and I'm getting 100 uniques per day.

So, my question is, is how do you evaluate a website's worth?

I mean, 650 hours * $70 an hour and you can say that the labor put into the site is worth $45,000, and then the very niche domain that currently is estimated at $210 with an alexa rank of 11M, plus it's potential to be a sub 10,000 alexa ranked site~ which are usually around $225,000. And then there's the potential for advertising income which I will eventually be looking into, hopefully racking up at least $100 a day or $36k a year... *3 for a business eval... $109k. Those factors total up to be over $350k, although I know for a fact my site is NOT worth $350,000 LOLOL! Maybe it'll be worth that in 2 or 3 years when it's been completely immersed in the niche.

So with such in mind, how do you assess a website's monetary value?
Any insight would be greately appreciated, young webmaster in want of business and web education!

 

It doesn't really work this way. Prospective buyers will only assess your website based on revenues, traffic and other assets - in this case the code/software/content of the site. To a buyer the hours you put into this are irrelevant, only the end result matters. It could be worth what you are expecting, but not because you put so much time in it, or because it has "potential", but rather because it has top quality content, coding, users etc.

 

This is so true. I've developed a site by myself and sold it. I've also hired a team of guys that I know; we all developed and sold it. I spent way more hours on the site I developed by myself, but the value was still lower than the site my team and I developed together. By the way... the team site's cumulative hours were more than the site I did solo. At the end of the day you have to sell based on traffic and revenue factors. Are you currently making any money from it?

 

The value of a website isn't the time put in to it, rather the prospect of how much revenue it could generate for the new owner. Its made easier when the current site is generating revenue, then you could simply sell it on for say 12 x monthly revenue (1 year of revenue), though different sites will attract different outcomes, especially if the domain name is one that is considered to be valuable.

Often unless its something generating money already, has a lot of traffic and is generally seen as valuable, its all to easy to replicate sites and traffic these days from scratch.

 

Everyone wants the money the site generates not the amount of effort you put in

 

Yip... It's funny but my target for every site that I build is $100 per day. Then I don't sell but just maintain the site. It's good money.

 

WOW, you do well for SEO.You can share experience with us .If there are many visitors and you can find real customers,that's enough I think .

 

The value of a website is depend on the revenue.