Henry Blodget has done some great analysis on the valuation of Craigslist.com which he pegs at around $5 billon. I asked Craig some questions at the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo in January to come up with a valuation. Here is my take base on my discussion with Craig:

Pageviews
Craig said that they are doing about 10 billion pageviews a month.

Bandwidth
I figure given Craigslists traffic they would get preferential committed rates for bandwidth and I would guess based on my experience that it about $1 million a month or $10-15 million a year.

Web Site
The site is written in perl and java and runs on linux. The design has not changed much since the beginning and there are no plans to do so said Craig. He also did not want to elaborate on the infrastructure roll outs, maintenance or the number of people involved with that part of the operation but I suspect they have 5-7 people doing that. I also would also make an educated guess that they are rolling out 5-10 servers a week to keep up with demand.

Server Costs
I guess monthly replacement costs to be $100,000 per month and actual physical hosting could be as high as $1 million per month. I could be off base here. So the total would be about $10-15 million.

Total Operation Costs
I figure total data center operation costs to be $15-30 million. Employee costs I would guess at $5-6 million for 25 employees. So the total costs would be $20-35 million.

Revenue
I asked Craig about this too and did not want to elaborate. However a rough calculation taking into account the fees for job posts and apartment listings in the various cities works out to about $1-1.5 million per week or $78 million for the year.

Valuation
What valuation would a public company generating revenues of $78 million less operational costs of $30 million (range is $20-35 million) with no debt, that has a 30% growth rate get? It is not unusual to see trailing P/Es in the mid 30’s. eBay has a P/E of 125 and Yahoo has a P/E of 60. Based on these number Craigslist could be worth $2-6 billion.

Disclosure: Craigslist won the award for Best Online Community Website