Actually, Noah, Max isn't that far off of the low end for membership sites. When AJ was acquiring Ryan's interest in MRC a couple years ago, we made a lot of inquiries about valuation for online businesses. The responses we got back, from people who had paid for professional valuations, or actually purchased membership sites, ranged from 4 months to 24 months of gross revenues, depending on how well established and marketed the website was.
Alternative valuation methods we were given included net over 3 years (assuming it is stable or growing) plus a value for content and other intellectual property and a number of other things.
I have a friend who purchased a small paysite for about 4x monthly gross and both buyer and seller were happy. I think that Max thought this was a membership site rather than a physical product store, and if it was, given the flat sales between years 2 and 3, and not including the value of the physical property (DVDs) the price quoted would be low for sure, but not totally out of the ballpark.






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