Online businesses are priced on profit, not revenue, and small deals are quoted per month while larger ones are quoted per year. This works in both. Every range below comes from reported closed sales, not asking prices.
What the business actually clears in a year. Not revenue, and not before you paid yourself.
This moves the number more than anything else on the form. Revenue that arrives every month without a new sale is what a buyer pays a premium for.
You will read that content sites and e-commerce stores sell for 30 to 45 times monthly profit. That figure has no traceable source. It circulates because blogs cite each other, and it is usually a software multiple applied to a business that is not software.
The marketplace that popularized monthly multiples publishes its own results. Empire Flippers closed 161 deals in 2025 at an average of 23.93 times monthly profit, down from 26.60 times the year before. Sellers listed at an average of 28.69 times. Buyers paid about 17 percent less than sellers asked.
Their own report puts it plainly: most small businesses are valued between one and four times annual earnings, whether they are an online business or a main-street one. The monthly convention makes the numbers look bigger. It does not make them different.
Four things, roughly in order of how much they matter. Whether revenue recurs. Whether the business runs without you. Whether one client or one traffic source carries most of it. And whether you can prove twelve months of clean books.
Concentration is the quiet one. FE International notes that a single client above 20 percent of revenue compresses an agency multiple by one to two full turns. On a business earning $200,000 that is a swing of $200,000 to $400,000 in sale price, caused by nothing but who your customers happen to be.
Working out what your business is really worth before you list it is the same job as finding the money your tax return hides on a main-street business. Different multiples, same principle: the profit line is not the number a buyer pays for.
On a multiple of profit, not revenue. Margins vary so widely online that revenue tells a buyer almost nothing: a SaaS earning 80 cents on the dollar and a store earning 20 cents are worth very different money on identical sales. Small website and e-commerce deals are usually quoted as a multiple of monthly net profit, while SaaS and agencies are quoted annually. They describe the same thing. Thirty times monthly is two and a half times annual.
Acquire.com reports a median of 3.9 times annual profit for closed acquisitions under $10M enterprise value, using 2025 data published in January 2026. SaaS Capital's 2025 survey of more than 1,500 private SaaS companies found a 4.8 times ARR multiple for bootstrapped companies, but that sample skews toward companies with $3M to $20M in ARR, so it reads high for a smaller business. The spread within that survey is wide: the top decile averaged 14.2 times and the bottom decile 1.9 times.
Not for content sites and e-commerce stores, which is where you will see it quoted most. Empire Flippers, whose marketplace popularized monthly multiples, closed its 2025 deals at an average of 23.93 times monthly profit, down from 26.60 times in 2024. Sellers asked an average of 28.69 times, so buyers paid about 17 percent less than sellers wanted. Software is the exception: SaaS trades higher than content because the revenue recurs, and a strong micro-SaaS can genuinely clear 45 times monthly. The mistake is applying a software multiple to a content site.
There is no credible dataset yet, so we do not publish a number. AI services businesses are too new for a meaningful set of closed comparable sales, and buyers are openly skeptical of businesses that are a thin layer over someone else's model. Until real transaction data exists, treat an AI agency like any other services business: it is priced on earnings, and it is discounted heavily for client concentration and for depending on the founder personally.
Because a buyer is purchasing next year, not last year. Revenue that arrives every month without a new sale is the closest thing to a guarantee that a small business can offer, so it earns a premium. One-time sales require the buyer to keep finding new customers from day one, which is risk, and risk is priced.
No, and this is the most common mistake sellers make. If the business needs you 30 hours a week, a buyer either does that work or hires someone to do it. Either way the cost is real. Work out what it would cost to replace yourself, subtract it, and value what is left. A business that runs without its owner is worth more than the same profit that depends on one.
One caveat worth stating plainly: every source above is a broker or marketplace reporting its own deals. No independent audited dataset exists for private digital business sales. We show sample sizes where publishers disclose them, and say so where they do not.