• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.79-98
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• 2009

Web traffic is becoming an important indicator to make inferences about internet companies' future prospects so that traditional firm valuation methods need to be modified to integrate the ideas of web traffic information as a major asset of internet companies. It is because web traffic is a measure of attracting visitors to firm's web site and is the basis for internet companies' marketing expenditure and customer acquisition and retention. Also the web traffic represents the internet companies' technological advances and marketability. The major purpose of this study is to show the relevance of web traffic for valuation of internet companies. For this, we test hypothesis with the firm's web traffic and financial data using the analysis model of Hand(2000a) derived from the log-linear model introduced by Ye and Finn(1999). Test results show that the web traffic, more specifically the number of unique visitors, visits, and page views are all positively related to the firm's value. This implies that the web traffic information should be considered as one of the important non-financial indicator for the internet firm valuation.