The median business sold for 25 months of revenue — 20 disclosed deals, 7.8 months in Japan against 29.3 overseas

We published the distribution of sale prices themselves in an earlier column: a median of ¥30M, with four orders of magnitude between the ends. But that number alone is no yardstick for “what would mine sell for?”, sale prices scale with the size of the business. To remove size, divide the sale price by monthly revenue and ask how many months of revenue the deal was worth.

Of the 346 cases published as of August 17, 2026, 160 are exits. Of those, only 20 disclose both the sale price and monthly revenue in concrete figures. A small n, but few other places can line up this multiple using sourced, actual amounts, so here is the distribution.

The multiple across 20 deals (price ÷ monthly revenue)

The median is about 25 months, a hair over two years of revenue. One caveat before reading further: this is a multiple on revenue, not profit. Deal practice usually quotes multiples on monthly profit, but only one published case disclosed both sale price and monthly profit, so a profit-based distribution cannot be drawn yet. At the same multiple, a higher-margin business is worth strictly more.

Japan 7.8 months, overseas 29.3

Split the 20 deals by region and they divide cleanly.

Nearly a 4x gap, but reading it as “Japanese buyers lowball” is too quick. What differs is the kind of business being sold. By business type (types with 3+ deals):

Japan’s disclosed deals are mostly marketplace-listed YouTube channels and small EC/app transfers, “flow” businesses whose revenue stops when the posting or sourcing stops. Buyers price in that fragility at around 6–10 months of revenue. Overseas disclosures center on SaaS and recurring-billing media, “stock” businesses that keep paying unless customers cancel. The same ¥1M month is not the same ¥1M month. A YouTube channel also carries the previous owner’s voice and style, a key-person risk the buyer inherits on day one. A multiple is the price attached to revenue repeatability. That is the clearest reading of these 20 deals.

Half of the deals fall within “1–3 years”

Back to the middle of the distribution: half the deals sit between 11 and 40 months, roughly one to three-plus years of revenue. Applied to a business at ¥1M/month, that’s ¥11M at the bottom quartile, about ¥25M at the median, about ¥40M at the top quartile (a restatement of observations, not an appraisal guide).

Also worth holding: the conversion to profit terms. If a 50%-margin business sold for 8 months of revenue, that’s 16 months of monthly profit. Japan’s 7.8-month median is roughly consistent, once margins are factored in, with the “one to two years of monthly profit” level repeatedly observed in the small-deal marketplaces we cover. Revenue multiples look low partly because the denominator is bigger.

When the multiple breaks

At the edges of the distribution sit the deals where this yardstick stopped working.

The minimum, 6.3 months, is a fully-outsourced apparel EC closing at ¥2.16M, small marketplace deals converge conservatively because buyers are individuals with limited capital and diligence time.

On the far side, AppArmor went for 69 months: a campus-safety app with a customer base that rarely churns, and competing bidders pushing the number up. WalkMan, a newsletter earning $300 a month, closed at 68 months, priced not on revenue but on its 92,000-subscriber list. And the maximum, 317 months: Really Good Emails sold at 26x annual revenue, because the buyer, AWeber, was buying not sales but exclusive access to a niche audience of email designers.

Multiples jump into the high double and triple digits when the buyer is purchasing something outside the P&L, a list, a community, a monopoly position. Conversely, a business that sells only its revenue rarely strays far from the one-to-four-years band.

Nine out of ten deals never state a multiple

The unmissable fact behind all this: of 160 exit cases, 140, nearly nine in ten, withhold the price, the revenue, or both. Disclosure happens when the seller has an incentive to disclose: a founder building a track record for the next venture, a newsletter or SaaS that made transparency its brand, a marketplace showing off closed deals. Deals that closed below hopes, or where the buyer demanded an NDA, sink together with their numbers. These 20 are the 20 selected for telling. The real distribution is wider, and likely thicker below.

Method and limits

The population is this site’s published cases only, not the market. Higher multiples are likelier to be talked about, so the distribution probably skews upward. With n=20, and smaller by region and type, read the medians as observations, not going rates. Overseas amounts are converted at ¥150/USD. The multiples themselves are currency-neutral (numerator and denominator share a currency). Our listing rules exclude sales at or below ¥1M, truncating the low end. Definitions follow the Data page’s “How to read the numbers”.

Exit routes are broken down in a separate column, and the sale-price distribution here. Browse individual deals in the exits & small M&A case list.