Website Valuation

Hello All !!

Recently i viewed some of the domain and website selling/auctioning market places like flippa, sedo , dan , goddady auctions etc .
One peculiar thing i've observed is the valuation of newly built sites with avg traffic and not so great design etc. So is the website selling business is that much lucrative , or it is just another hype in the making.
Also as a newbie, if we start building a site, what all factors should we keep in mind to enhance the overall site valuation in future if we want to sell it. Can someone please throw some light on the parameters that make a site worthy for a million dollar valuation.

Thanks in advance !!

There are a great number of articles out there on the web if you're looking for serious replies, but IMO if you want to have a service worth over $1m+ then it'll benefit you to have an active user base. This will lower the risk that the buyer would have to take thus increasing your company value. If you simply want to "build" something and hope it'll be worth $1m, it's also possible if you have teams of developers who can build & maintain it. So, in short, if the site is already profitable it's HUGE plus. An e-commerce shop goes for 2-3x yearly net profits. A SaaS business can go for up to 7x generally speaking (since it's more stable).

It's much more difficult than people believe to build a platform worth over $1m. The process of finding buyers/sellers will probably take a long while. Honestly, I would say, don't build something with the intention of just selling it off.. try to make a successful project and if it doesn't work out you can put it up for sale.