As noted by the man himself, $820,000 might be an undervaluation. So, a not entirely serious attempt at valuation.

No Adsense, so we don’t have to worry about that. Say, $100 a week in donations and a further $100 a week from the Amazon link. Yes, just guesses but they aren’t the important figures anyway. Say $10,000 a year.

Blog ads. Patron and 2nd spots are currently empty. I have a feeling he’s recently changed his prices. Listed currently at $2,000 and $1,000 a week respectively. Let’s halve those rates to give us something that we think might be full all the time.

Four ads up in a 6 ad strip at $375 a week.

OK, ignore the fact that sometimes he donates ad space (also ignore longer term ad buys), assume that we’ve taken care of that in the two free slots and the 50% reduction in pricing on the premium slots.

We have an income of $3,000 a week from blog ads, $156,000 a year, plus our $10,000 from other sources.

What about costs? Bandwidth and server, say $200 a month? Get Sekimori round once a year to polish up the design for a $1,000? OK, all in, $5,000 a year.

Gross margin before salary, $161,000 a year.

To value the business we do not want to try and work out what Glenn actually gets himself, we want to work out what someone else would pay someone else to do the same work. Nick Denton started paying Wonkette $1,000 per month. Right, so now we have an ebitda (earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization) of $149,000.

The NYT says it is paying 23 times estimated ebitda for About.com. Thus, the value of Instapundit is 23 times $149,000, or, just under $3.5 million.

I’ve been pretty conservative with the earnings numbers and over on the costs.

Glenn, the main number for the New York Times is 212 556 1234.

Update: L’olivier has an interesting take on blog revenues. Worth reading.