As I wrote in my mission statement in this blog, I was going to launch some concept sites. This post is about the first one I’ve launched. Read about the ups and downs of it.

In many forums, one of the most often recurring questions is; what is my site worth? This is not an easy question to answer, especially if you don’t know the site in question and it is totally impossible if you don’t know or don’t get the business model behind it.

There is at least one type of site of which it is quite possible to estimate the value within reasonable bounds and that is a site which derives income from CPM (get paid per 1000 impressions) ads. These kind of sites run completely on traffic and traffic alone. More traffic is more money for that kind of site.

I have been working on a project to get as close as possible to the value of a CPM as I possibly could and I think we have succeeded in doing that. But we also created some interesting side effects.

On Cubestat.com you can valuate your website. The amount might be much too high or much too low, but if you have a site that counts on revenue from CPM ads, it is likely quite close to what you make or you are using the wrong CPM ads. Of course it is also possible you are monetizing your site incorrectly.

We think, that if you put a well tuned CPM campaign on a site with enough visitors (it doesn’t really work for very low traffic sites), you’ll get the amount we estimate.

While this method of estimation was the first method we implemented, that did not stop us from continuing our quest for a good estimation. We worked hard to complete algorithms that are also correct on CPC (per click) and even on CPA (per action) or CPL (per lead). The latter systems are not yet running properly and we are split testing them on the site, but the results are promising.

When the site was started, we expected to be just another estimator site. We were working from the codebase of xinureturns.com and our goal was to lose some features and add estimation. The site effects of the site turned out even more interesting.

One of the cool things is that people are using Cubestat.com as a search engine. They jab words into the search bar and they do in fact find the most popular sites about their subjects. This was an unexpected side effect, but it is not entirely unpleasant. Due to the currently already enormous amount of urls in the site it very well can be called a search engine of sorts.

Another thing we noticed is that people are using it to get a PR update from Google. Cubestat.com is one of the site people submit their URL to when they start out to make a new site. It is no secret that getting your brand new site indexed first and for most via higher PR sites is good for your PR. So a cool trick of getting traffic is to add your site to Cubestat! Who would’ve thought?! We didn’t.

As first concept site this turned out very well; it is working and working well. The question is; can we make any substantial money with a site like this. If not, at least we have something which people can and do use and which was a lot of fun to put together.

More will certainly follow about this one!