Fred Destin has a post on his blog about the value of a Unique Monthly Visitor (UMV) at various sites:

The Value of a Unique Monthly Visitor by site around Q2-Q3 2006:

• YouTube $23
• CNET $16
• MySpace as valued by the Google ad deal: $11.25
• Facebook at 1bn: $67
• Google: $272 !
• Yahoo $48

Read the rest of Fred Destin’s article to see the conditions and hedging he places on this analysis before you start nitpicking about the methodology.

Assuming Fred’s valuation policy is consistent here, it’s interesting to see how little a unique is valued at MySpace compared to Facebook. That must be why Facebook is having trouble selling for 1 billion; this analysis makes the $1 billion Facebook valuation look inflated.

I would love to see a mashup of Alexa and Google Finance to find out what a UMV is worth at any public internet company. Similarly, I would like to be able to insert predicted valuations for private companies into such a mashup. Shouldn’t be too hard to build (just divide market cap by UMVs), right?

It’s a great analysis if for nothing else other than seeing how sites are valued relative to their traffic.