How do you put a value on something so closely aligned with an individual, which really has very little to it?

The Drudge Report would be worth next to nothing without Matt Drudge. If you wanted to buy the site you’d pretty much have to by him too.

Once you’ve got over that little hump, how would you even begin to put a value on it? Before you even got to how much you should pay for it, first you’d have to make an assessment of what you’d be paying for.

Portfolio has looked at several different ways to value the business and come to a series of valuations, which basically reflect the malaise that is valuing online publishing businesses.

It assessed Drudge in terms of eyeballs on the page – comparing it with a value paid for Slate in 2004 of roughly $4 per visitor – and come up with a $5.3M price tag. It also reached a valuation based on potential advertising revenue and concluded that this could be between $9.6M to $14.4M in relation to a supposed 60 million monthly pageviews.

The third valuation was based on a supposed figure Drudge himself might call for. Portfolio says:

“Drudge’s advertising agency recently claimed that the site enjoys 360 million monthly pageviews and 10 million unique visitors a month. That might lead Drudge to conclude that the site is worth anywhere from $40 million (using unique visitors) to $86.4 million (using ad revenue from pageviews).”

The bottom line figure, that which Portfolio thinks you might get it for had you the money and you could convince him to keep his nose to grindstone, $10M to $20M – then only if he’s prepared to sell.