For automated web site valuation method — Patent granted

Patent describes system for generating automated appraisals of web sites.

There are a lot of automated web site valuation and appraisal tools out there. Now the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent covering a method of automatically valuing a web site.

U.S. Patent 8,214,272 (pdf), issued today, covers “Web Site Valuation”. The patent’s abstract reads:

As stated by the invention, a method for automatically determining an appraisal value of a web site is disclosed. The method may include obtaining machine observable information from the web site and determining a machine observable characteristic of the web site based at least in part on the machine observable information from the web site. The method may also include storing at least one of the machine observable information from the web site, and the machine observable characteristic of the web site. The method may further include determining the appraisal value of the web site based at least in part on at least one of the machine observable information from the web site, and the machine observable characteristic of the web site.

Let’s make that simpler: plug in a web site name, a system runs stats on it (e.g. traffic, domain name value, etc.), and spits out a value.

The patent is assigned to Rafael Sosa, who maintains this blog.

Brian Scott Glassman is also listed as an inventor. As stated by this page, the patent came regarding for work on WebsiteWorth.com. But it looks like that never took off; the domain just leads to a dead blog.

The patent was filed in 2006.