The number of households in Australia is projected to increase by up to 4 million over the next 25 years, according to projections released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). This is an increase from 7.8 million households in 2006 to up to 11.8 million in 2031.

Family households are projected to show the largest increase and to remain the most common household type in Australia. The number of family households is projected to increase by as many as 2.4 million households, from 5.6 million in 2006 to up to 8.0 million in 2031.

Couple only families are projected to increase the most rapidly of all types of families over the next 25 years. If recent trends continue, couple only families will overtake the number of couple families with children, in either 2013 or 2014. This is mainly related to the ageing of the population, with baby boomers becoming ‘empty nesters’.

The number of Australians living alone is projected to have the most rapid increase of all household types, increasing by up to 91% over the next 25 years to 3.6 million by 2031. The rapid increase of people living alone is mainly related to the ageing of the population.

4 million more households in 25 years: ABS

The number of households in Australia is projected to increase by up to 4 million over the next 25 years, according to projections released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). This is an increase from 7.8 million households in 2006 to up to 11.8 million in 2031.

Family households are projected to show the largest increase and to remain the most common household type in Australia. The number of family households is projected to increase by as many as 2.4 million households, from 5.6 million in 2006 to up to 8.0 million in 2031.

Couple only families are projected to increase the most rapidly of all types of families over the next 25 years. If recent trends continue, couple only families will overtake the number of couple families with children, in either 2013 or 2014. This is mainly related to the ageing of the population, with baby boomers becoming ‘empty nesters’.

The number of Australians living alone is projected to have the most rapid increase of all household types, increasing by up to 91% over the next 25 years to 3.6 million by 2031. The rapid increase of people living alone is mainly related to the ageing of the population.

The details of these projects including an explanation behind the assumptions used, and data for states and territories, are available in The ABS’ Household and Family Projections, Australia, 2006 to 2031 (cat. no. 3236.0).

The latest survey of the Australian Bureau of Statistics on internet activity found that there were 9.1 million active internet subscribers in Australia.

The figures are based on results from all ISPs operating in Australia with more than 1,000 active subscribers as at 31 December 2009.

Other highlights of the ABS survey:

• The phasing out of dial-up internet connections continued with nearly 90% of internet connections now being non dial-up.
• Australians also continued to access higher download speeds, with 62% of access connections having a download speed of 1.5Mbps or greater.
• Digital subscriber line (DSL) continued to be the major technology for connections, accounting for 51% of non dial-up connections. However, this percentage share has decreased since June 2009 when DSL represented 57% of non dial-up connections.
• Mobile wireless via a datacard, dongle or USB modem was the fastest growing technology in internet connections, increasing to 2.8 million in December 2009. This represents a 40% increase from June 2009.

Active subscribers are defined as subscribers who have accessed the internet or paid for access to the internet during the three months ending 31 December 2009.

Source: ABS

A news story yesterday at the Sunday Telegraph reported that Westpac is the worst of the big four banks for its charges on popular lending products like mortgages, credit cards and car loans compared to those charged by credit unions and non-bank financial institutions.

The article was based on a research conducted by InfoChoice, an Australian finance comparison site, which noted that potential savings of $6.7 billion could have been made from mortgages had borrowers used the lending facilities of non-bank lenders or credit unions.

On average, the report said, customers with Westpac were worse off by more than $4,165 a year compared with those using the financing facilities of non-bank lenders based on an assumed $300,000 home loan, $10,000 in an access savings account, a $25,000 car loan and $3,000 credit card account. Altogether, this bundle of finance facilities would cost a customer a total of $23,064 a year at Westpac.

The research, according to the story, examined the rates, fees and charges on a range of “popular banking products.” The National Australia Bank, said the report, is about $600 a year cheaper than Westpac.

As expected, Westpac came out with a statement not so much to defend its position but rather to point out that the study was restrictive in that the survey focused only on selective banking products offered by the bank. As a result, the figures, claims Westpac, do not represent an accurate measurement of its competitive position.

How many times have I been asked: “How many hits does your website get a day?”

Frankly, I find that difficult to answer. If I give them the correct answer, they may say I am trying to be smart. If I say, it depends on what you mean by “hits”, they may think that I am trying to hide my website stats or I am also being evasive.

But in all honesty, my answer is: What do you mean by “hits”?

Firstly, definition of the term “hit” varies. Among webmasters, a “hit” is a request for a file from a web server. A file can be a web page, graphic, icon, banner, sound file or anything. If for example, you type in your browser address box http://thefilipinoaustralian.com/index.php which is the homepage of The Filipino Australian News, when that page is displayed, that single page display will be equivalent to at least 17 “hits” or 17 files being served to you. These are:

Top Page:

* 1 top banner ad
* 1 logo
* 1 photo in the feature box

Left Sidebar:
* 1 Facebook image
* 1 Australian visa image

Middle Column:
4 thumbnail images of the Recently added articles

Right Sidebar:
* 2 images of 125×125 ads
* 1 image 250×90
* 3 icons preceding the section headings

* 1 image for local bloggers
* 1 Google ad

If you return to The Filipino Australian News homepage after going to another page, chances are your web browser would pull the files from your hard drive cache or in a temporary computer memory storage rather than request again the server. Cache-ing speeds up the display of pages and since the files are now in your computer memory, no additional hits are generated, and thus not counted.

Although many websites are still encoded to display static pages, these days many pages are generated dynamically and served “on the fly.” Requests for these pages create more “hits”.

In our earlier example, the pages which will be served on the fly are:

1 top story link

Left Sidebar:
10 story links

Middle Section:

* 10 story links
* 3 links to A Matter of Sharing
* 10 links to Recent comments

These pages which will be served on the fly would be equal to 34 “hits”, or altogether the homepage would create at least 51 “hits” each time the page is requested or opened.

Obviously, we need to be careful when someone says, “My website can give you 10,000 hits a day.”

Hits are not the same as visitors. Hits are just files making up a page which are also served or displayed each time a page is requested or opened.

If you are an advertiser, what does this mean?

As an advertiser, if a site uses “hits” as a point of reference you need to know how that site defines “hits”. Other sites use the term to mean actual visitors. Although this is an improper use of the word, still it gives you an idea what you are buying.

To avoid any misunderstanding with the publisher, it should be made clear at the outset what the advertiser is paying for. If the agreement is that the rate is based on the number of times an ad is displayed, then this should be made clear. In which case, the rate would be based on page views (or page impressions) sometimes called the CPM model or cost-per-thousand views.

The advertising rate could also be a time-based rate, like a flat monthly fee. Or, the advertising rate could also be based on number of clicks called pay-per-click like those of Google ads.

Regardless of whether an advertiser is willing to pay based on page views , a fixed time-based fee or even click throughs, this should be made clear before starting an advertising campaign.

But whatever you decide, do not decide based on “hits”. This is one term which requires a lot of explanation. At times, it is also the cause of misunderstanding.

Even to someone like me who enjoys browsing over site statistics and testing the accuracy of the resulting metrics, understanding an Alexa traffic rank is not an easy task.

Except for the fact that the Alexa traffic ranking system is based on information generated from Alexa toolbar users and that “A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Reach and Page Views” plus some kind of “data normalization” which also are not explained, there is not much information about the Alexa ranking system.

In its FAQ, Alexa also stated: “Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the past three months of global traffic according to our diverse data sources, and are updated weekly.”

Given this minimum traffic tracking period, I wonder how a blog I set up at WordPress.com about two weeks ago was able to attract a traffic ranking. Is it because that blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and Alexa is biased towards WordPress.com-hosted sites? That’s probably not the case. There must be other sites hosted by WordPress.com which have been online for many months now, yet they are still showing an Alexa “No Data” status. (By the way, the small Alexa image on this page shows “No Data” for Alexa which we could only surmise that Alexa did not like to make its traffic ranking public.)

Metrics like unique visits, page views and the like in gauging site traffic performances are still more reliable indicators. They are also easy to understand. I can also explain the figures to my clients.

But I cannot say the same thing with Alexa’s traffic ranking. After all, according to Alexa, if a site traffic ranking is beyond 100,000, the figures are statistically meaningless. For a site traffic rank to be statistically meaningful and reliable, a site should be close to the top rank.

Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.) // Source: Alexa Help page, “Sites ranked beyond 100,000 – how reliable are the stats?”

With many websites that are not even close to the top 1,000 or even 50,000 (let alone #1), I wonder why advertising placement agencies even bother to look at a website’s Alexa traffic rank!

I am re-posting an article which I wrote last March at Matter of Sharing and which I would like to revisit within the next few days. Wondering whether there had been articles published recently on the subject, I checked out Google to find out whether I could find some other articles on “website valuation.”

I was very pleased to note that our March article was on top of the list. Above screenshot is the Google search results.

Moving on: What I really want to establish an approach along the lines suggested by other consultants I referred to in my March article. But I need to do some more digging and see if I could find other literature on this topic.

Why can’t we just use an online site valuation calculator? My position is very clear in this regard. I don’t buy figures produced by online site valuers. Because I don’t have information of how those figures (very ridiculous in most cases) were established, how does one expect me or anyone to accept those figures.

Anyway, here is what I wrote last March:

How do you value a website?

Valuing a website is not an easy task. Even if the same valuation methodology is applied, still the values assigned to websites could vary as no two websites are alike.

Valuing a website is even made more difficult because there is no hard and fast valuation rules. There are no standard valuation methods which can be applied to websites. The traditional valuation methods like value being the equivalent of a multiple x annual sales or multiple x annual profit would not be appropriate methods, especially on cases of popular websites with no established revenue or profit stream but with a growing and loyal membership base.

Given this background, one approach which I find worth exploring is the technique employed by a company in valuing a client’s web publishing business using unique visitors as a principal price determinant. What the company did was to calculate the average monthly unique visits of the web publisher’s sites over a period of three months and apply a certain dollar value to the average monthly unique visitors. It reported:

For the current crop of web 2.0 websites, the kind of multiples being paid to buy companies is around $30-40 per unique visitor. (Note that unique visitors should be counted over a period of one month, usually the most recent). This well known and oft-quoted article from November 2005 establishes an average of $38 per unique visitor based on a range of different website sales.

The trick in valuing your own company is to choose a suitable multiple and here it is best to be conservative. Unless you really are the size of a YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to justify such lofty valuations. Within our diversified web publishing company for instance, we use multiples in the range of $3-8 depending on the site in question.

Digression

Assuming that the only consideration is unique visitors or membership base, does that mean that a website with a reported 175 million users like Facebook would be valued $5.25 – $7 billion?

Recently, Facebook was reported to be valued at $3.5 billion, but using Facebook as an example in this case is not a good example. It was also reported that Facebook had a revenue between $250 million and $300 million during year 2008, and that the price may be depressed on account of the current worldwide economic condition.

Valuing a website using unique visitors: a modified approach

Back to the site valuation using unique visitors: One feature which I like in the unique visitors valuation approach is its simplicity and understandability. The issue I have however is that even assuming that the buyer and seller can agree on valuing a website based on unique visitors, still negotiations could bog down from disagreements on (a) the basis of calculating the average unique visitors or membership base. Should this be weekly, monthly or quarterly? On what basis should the average unique visitors count be calculated as such? (b) how much value would be assigned to each unique visitor. How can that value be justified?

Is there another way of valuing a website using its traffic stats like unique visits, yet the stats reflect verifiable effectiveness of site promotions, loyalty of members/visitors, age of the site, costs of replicating the website, and prevailing market charge rates?

We will attempt an alternative valuation approach in our next article.

Meanwhile, how much is your website worth?

Please do check back next week. We will share you our finds. Hopefully, we should be able to develop some kind of guidelines which we can apply. I am certain there are others who are equally interested in this subject.

I ask this question because as I was watching this morning’s news, one finance commentator said that a 0.10% to 0.15% increase in variable loan rate would mean something like $300 – $400 a week.

I find that incredible. Perhaps, I did not hear him right. The commentator was probably referring to the gross repayment amount and not the resultant increase in home loan repayment. But even that, I still find the assessment not appropriate considering that borrowers have varying levels of mortgages.

It’s good after almost an hour the same program flashed another report that a 0.15% increase would mean approximately $27 per month on a $300,000 mortgage.

That’s more like it.

We hope next time, finance analysts and commentators will double check their calculations before opening their mouth and start scaring the listeners out of their pants.