Digital Assets: NFTs, Domains, and Your Net Worth

If you've been tracking your net worth the traditional way — bank accounts, retirement funds, maybe a house — you might be leaving out a growing category of assets that live entirely online. Domain names, digital businesses, content libraries, and yes, NFTs can all hold real value. But figuring out how much value? That's where things get interesting.

Let's walk through the major types of digital assets, how to think about valuing them, and when it actually makes sense to include them in your net worth.

What Counts as a Digital Asset?

A digital asset is anything of value that exists in a digital format and that you own or control. That's a broad definition on purpose. Here are some common examples:

• Domain names — yourname.com, a keyword-rich .io, or a premium .com you picked up years ago
• NFTs — digital art, collectibles, virtual land, membership tokens
• Online businesses — SaaS products, e-commerce stores, content sites with ad revenue
• Digital content and IP — courses, ebooks, templates, stock photos, music catalogs
• Social media accounts — not easily sellable, but large accounts do have market value
• Cryptocurrency — we've covered this one separately in our crypto tracking guide

The key question for net worth tracking isn't whether something is "digital." It's whether it has a realizable market value — meaning someone would actually pay you money for it.

Valuing Domain Names

Domain names are one of the more straightforward digital assets to value, though there's still a wide range. A generic .com domain might be worth $10 at renewal, while a premium keyword domain could fetch five or six figures.

A few ways to estimate domain value:

• Check recent comparable sales on sites like NameBio or GoDaddy's domain appraisal tool. These aren't perfect, but they give you a ballpark.
• Look at revenue if the domain is attached to a website generating income. A domain with consistent organic traffic and ad revenue is worth more than a parked page.
• Consider renewal cost vs. market price. If you're paying $12/year to hold a domain and similar ones sell for $500-$2,000, that's a real asset.

For most people, individual domains are a small piece of the picture. But if you're a domain investor or you own a few premium names, they're worth tracking.

NFTs: An Honest Take

Here's where we need to be real. NFTs can have value, but they're one of the hardest digital assets to accurately price, and for good reason.

The NFT market is volatile, illiquid, and speculative. Floor prices for collections can swing 80% in a week. Many NFTs that sold for thousands during the 2021-2022 hype cycle are now essentially worthless. And unlike stocks or crypto, there's no continuous market — your NFT is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it right now, and finding that buyer can take weeks or months.

If you do hold NFTs, here's a practical approach:

• Use the floor price of the collection as a conservative estimate, not the price you paid or the last recorded sale of a similar piece.
• Discount heavily for illiquidity. If it would take you weeks to sell, the "value" on paper isn't the same as cash in hand.
• Be honest about whether the market still exists for a given collection. If trading volume has dried up, the realistic value may be close to zero.

Should you include NFTs in your net worth? You can, but consider keeping them in a separate "speculative" category so they don't inflate your financial picture. A $50,000 NFT portfolio that you couldn't actually liquidate for $5,000 is misleading on a balance sheet.

Online Businesses and SaaS

If you own a revenue-generating online business — a SaaS app, an e-commerce store, a niche content site — this is potentially your most valuable digital asset. And unlike NFTs, there are well-established methods for valuation.

Online businesses are typically valued as a multiple of their monthly or annual profit. The multiplier depends on the type of business, its growth trajectory, and how dependent it is on you personally.

• Content/affiliate sites: Often sell for 30-40x monthly profit
• E-commerce stores: Typically 25-45x monthly profit depending on the brand
• SaaS products: Can command 4-10x annual recurring revenue for healthy businesses

Marketplaces like Flippa, Empire Flippers, and Acquire.com give you a sense of what businesses like yours are selling for. If you want a deeper dive on this, our guide to valuing a small business for net worth covers the fundamentals.

Digital Content and Intellectual Property

If you've created digital products — online courses, ebooks, templates, a library of stock photos, music — these have value too, especially if they generate passive income.

The simplest approach: value these assets based on the income they produce. A course that brings in $500/month consistently might be worth $10,000-$20,000 as an asset. Content that's no longer generating revenue is probably not worth including.

Intellectual property like trademarks, patents, or licensing agreements is trickier. If you're earning royalties, you can value the income stream. Otherwise, IP value is speculative until it's generating cash or someone makes you an offer.

Practical Approaches to Tracking Digital Assets

Here's where things come together. The challenge with digital assets isn't just valuing them — it's keeping track of them consistently alongside your traditional finances.

A few tips:

• Update valuations quarterly, not daily. Most digital assets don't have real-time pricing, and checking constantly leads to emotional decision-making.
• Use conservative estimates. When in doubt, value lower. You'd rather be pleasantly surprised than financially deluded.
• Separate speculative from stable. Keep your domain portfolio or NFT collection in a different mental bucket than your index funds. They have fundamentally different risk profiles.

With Nova, you can add digital assets as manual entries alongside your linked accounts. Check out Nova's features to see how manual asset tracking works — it makes it easy to see everything in one place without pretending that a speculative NFT has the same reliability as your savings account.

When to Include vs. Exclude from Net Worth

Not every digital asset deserves a line on your balance sheet. Here's a simple rule of thumb:

Include it if you could realistically sell it within 30-60 days for a predictable price. Domains with comparable sales data, revenue-generating businesses, income-producing content — these qualify.

Exclude it (or heavily discount it) if the market is thin, the value is purely speculative, or you have no real intention of selling. That profile picture NFT you bought in 2021? Probably leave it off.

The goal of tracking net worth is to get an honest picture of where you stand financially. Use our free net worth calculator to see your complete picture today. Digital assets are a real and growing part of that picture for many people — just make sure you're being realistic about what they're actually worth.