One thing I thought I should share with the website flipping community is that I purchased a domain for my son which is ryderyates.com. My business partner David has done the same thing for his kids. It will be exciting to see what he becomes in his professional life and I have a feeling he’ll be happy I had the foresight to protect his personal brand in case he ever needs it. By the time he’s ready to use it, the domain will already be 18 years old.

I have no idea if a .com domain will still be as important in the year 2030, but as of now, the age of a domain can be important when it comes to search engine optimization. If fact, I have been shopping around for an aged domain to complete a search engine friendly domain change. Most of the parked domains that are from the year 2006 and older in this particular market are priced over $5000. In fact, one of the sellers was asking $50,000 for a domain. When you are buying or selling websites, don’t forget to consider the value of the age of that domain!

Now, on to the website flipping market news for this week.

Market Overview

This week 625 websites sold. The highest priced website sold for $47,000. Approximately 12 sites sold in excess of $10,000.

We’ve noticed a jump this week in the average revenue multiple up to over 11 times. We’ve been noticing more quality sites popping up in the last few weeks. Could it be due to people needing some holiday money?

New FlipWebsites.com Reader’s Sites for Sale

We’ve added a new section to our site called Established Websites for Sale. This is a free service for anyone who submits their sites through our Sell Your Website page. All the sites listed there are from our community of readers. If you see something you like, let us know and we’ll connect you with the seller. We’ll be keeping it up to date each week as sites come in.

Notable Sellers

Most Active Seller
Seller: Sun Shine
Total Revenue: $3,540
Sites Sold: 17
Avg. Sales Price: $274
Notes: We’re consistently seeing him on the top of this list. This seller primarily uses a “template” style format where he or she sells aged blogs with only 7 days of revenue and calculates the monthy revenue from the 7 days.

High Activity & High Avg. Sales Price Seller
Sun Shine and SmartBusiness have gained this title once again this week.

Notable Website Sales

Highest Priced
Site: medicalmarijuanastrains.com
Price: $47,000
Bids: 28
Seller: reallifeproperties
Notes: This site was claiming over 350,000 uniques/month. It’s in a bit of a regulated market so I think the price on this one was fair for a buyer who is willing to take that risk. I just checked the site and it’s currently showing 403 forbidden for me so I hope the buyer knows what they are doing! It just goes to show that you need to be careful during the ownership change.

Most Active
Site: InstantFiles.net
Price: $2,350
Bids: 88
Seller: Financial Freedom
Notes: This site was essentially a business-in-a-box by providing an outsourced facebook fan service. The auction copy is pretty salesy and focuses on the business opportunity.

Our Watchlist

These are the sites that we were close to bidding on or buying but didn’t. At the time of posting this, they were still actively for sale.

• autocarspeed.com
• readbud.com
• gardenbeet.com
• indyposted.com
• fantasyinspiration.com

Unfortunately I won’t be doing our usual website flipping update this week. Why, you ask? Well, tomorrow is 11/11/11 and my wife Melissa and I will be bringing a new life into this world. That’s right, my son will be born tomorrow!

I need to put all my focus in preparing for the big day so I’m skipping this week’s site flipping market update. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll be back next week (probably half-asleep from late nights with the new baby) with an update on the baby and on the buying and selling website market.

If you’d like to wish us luck or have any advice on the transition from 1 to 2 kids in a family, please comment below.

- Chris

It wasn’t a bad month for Flippa. They facilitated over $3,000,000 of website buying and selling on their marketplace. Sales prices averaged approximately 7 times monthly income for sites selling in October.

Interesting fact: In October, two sites with over 100 backlinks in Google and no revenue sold at $405 and $750. It will be interesting to see if Flippa’s new backlink search feature will affect prices for these types of sites.

Scitechdaily.com – A Quick Site Flip Goldmine We Missed in October

The site sold for $34,000 and had no monetization. Let’s assume you were to increase the revenue per unique visit to a meager $0.10. That would put your monthly income at $5284.20/month. You could likely get that by adding some relevant advertising to the site starting a few days after you took the site over. Give it a few months at $5,000/month average net profit and you could likely flip the site for $60,000. This would give you a $41,000 profit on the site in 3 months. You have to love the power of the quick flip of undervalued sites!

Site Flipping Market Headlines for October 2011

• Upgrade Adjustments on Flippa
  Flippa is ratcheting up their prices again with featured listing pricing going up to $50 per feature and the success fee cap being raised from $500 to $2,000.
• Sell My Website A Step by Step Guide
  Excellent article on how and where to go to sell your website including tips on how to prepare and places to go to sell a site.
• Find Websites with Backlinks and Verified Analytics
  We previously wrote our own software to pull from Flippa’s API to allow us to have this feature available to us. We’re looking forward to more search functionality in the future. Kudos to Flippa for adding these features.
• Buying Your First Site? What NOT to buy at Flippa
  This forum post provides tips on what to avoid if you’re considering buying a site for the first time.
• How to transfer stats?
  Every wondered how to transfer a Google Analytics account to a new owner? The answer is here.
• Flipping Websites in 3 Easy to Remember Steps
  This article is a nice overview of the overall strategy for one method of flipping sites.
• Top things to look for when buying a site for a future resale?
  I love lists. Here’s a list of things to look for when your goal is to buy a site to sell in the future.

Did you notice any trends or have any successes or failures? Let me know by commenting below.

Market Overview

This week 664 websites sold for a combined $1,074,606 making this a seven figure week for Flippa. The highest priced website sold for $110,000 with a majority of sites selling in the $150 range. 21 sites sold in excess of $10,000. Several of the sites selling in the $10,000+ range can be considered internet marketing related (SEO, Make Money Online, Web Design, etc.)

FlipWebsites.com Reader’s Sites for Sale

The sites below are sites submitted on our sell your website page that we didn’t buy ourselves.

www.womensdanceshoes.org
What is the average monthly unique visitors?:  200
What is the average monthly profit?:    $20.00
How many months has the site been profitable?: 15
How many hours per week do you spend maintaining the site?: 1
How is the site Monetized?: Advertising (CPM, CPC)
What are the primary sources of traffic?: Organic Search
How Much Would You Like to Sell For?:  $75.00
Additional Comments: (I removed the adsense code for now)  This site is ranked page one #1 on Google for main keyword.

www.collegiateliving.com
What is the average monthly unique visitors?:  3598
What is the average monthly profit?:    $4333
How many months has the site been profitable?: 24
How many hours per week do you spend maintaining the site?: 5
How is the site Monetized?: Selling a Product
What are the primary sources of traffic?: Organic Search, Email Marketing, Referring Sites
How Much Would You Like to Sell For?:  $55,500
Additional Comments: The site is deep rooted in best practice organic Google placement on many keyterms.  Proper SEO practices have been administered from day 1. Site traffic spikes dramatically in Q4 and most of the sales occur in Q4. I also have another domain name for sale that will make a nice package which is www.collegiatebuzz.com, a premium domain name as part of the package.

www.wsoworth.com
What is the average monthly unique visitors?:  238 in 18 days
What is the average monthly profit?:    $0
How many months has the site been profitable?: 0
How many hours per week do you spend maintaining the site?: 5
How is the site Monetized?: Advertising (CPM, CPC), Affiliate (CPA), Selling a Product, Selling a Service
What are the primary sources of traffic?: Organic Search, Referring Sites
How Much Would You Like to Sell For?:  $150
Additional Comments: I am in need of funds and want to sell this site. The site is new but has received 238 visitors in just 18 days with not much promotion.

Please contact us if you are interested in any of these sites. If you’d like to see your site listed here, please visit the sell your website page and submit your site to us.

Notable Sellers

Most Active Seller
Seller: Sun Shine
Total Revenue: $4,928
Sites Sold: 18
Avg. Sales Price: $274
Notes: This seller primarily uses a “template” style format where he or she sells aged blogs with only 7 days of revenue and calculates the monthy revenue from the 7 days.

High Activity & High Avg. Sales Price Seller
Seller: mycompanyname
Total Revenue: $3,806
Sites Sold: 7
Avg. Sales Price: $544
Notes: This seller sells brand new “turnkey” membership style websites with no traffic or revenue.

Notable Website Sales

Highest Priced
Site: mywibes.com
Price: $110,000
Bids: 1
Seller: mywibes
Notes: This site was profiting about $1000/month by placing advertising on mobile sites generated with their system. The site ended sold with only one bidder. With a claimed 1.3 million unique visits per month, this was likely a good deal for the right kind of buyer.

Most Active
Site: BookmarkingJuice.com
Price: $952
Bids: 74
Seller: WebKing7
Notes: This site was essentially a business-in-a-box by providing an outsourced social bookmarking service. The seller used a $1 no-reserve strategy, bonuses, and created curiosity by not revealing several “secrets” such as their traffic sources or outsourced provider’s name.

Our Watchlist

These are the sites that we were close to bidding on or buying but didn’t. At the time of posting this, they were still actively for sale.

• librarium-online.com
• psd-tutorial.com

Market Overview

This week 650 websites sold for a combined $548,866. The highest priced website sold for $75,000 with a majority of sites selling in the $150 range. Nine sites sold in excess of $10,000. A majority of sites for sale continue to be sites less than one month old with little to no monthly revenue.

FlipWebsites.com Reader’s Sites for Sale

The sites below are sites submitted on our sell your website page that we didn’t buy ourselves.

www.how-to-last-longer-in-bed-for-men.com
What is the average monthly unique visitors?:  9.274
What is the average monthly profit?:    $400
How many months has the site been profitable?: 2
How many hours per week do you spend maintaining the site?: 10
How is the site Monetized?: Selling a Product
What are the primary sources of traffic?: Organic Search
How Much Would You Like to Sell For?:  $600
Additional Comments: I want to sell the website because i have to spend to many hours to get profit with my system.

www.noticesboard.com
What is the average monthly unique visitors?:  not active site
What is the average monthly profit?:    $not active site
How many months has the site been profitable?: not active
How many hours per week do you spend maintaining the site?: not active
How is the site Monetized?: Advertising (CPM, CPC), Selling a Service
What are the primary sources of traffic?: Organic Search
How Much Would You Like to Sell For?:  $9000.00
Additional Comments: i created this classifieds website as i think most classifieds website are merely text links and looks boring. Hence a noticesboard look a like site is born. Listings or classifieds are post like post-it notes or pin up notes which looks beautiful asthetically. I had also developed a CMS, user sign in, my watch list, social media sharing, payment structure, SEM, advertisement structure for the whole site. Unfortunately due to my very busy working schedules, i am not able to continue the project (this is my hobby site, merely to build something for my own fun). It is a very well developed site. I am really looking for somebody who can bring this site to a next level that it truly deserves. The price is the cost i had spend developing this site. However it is negotiable especially if you can demonstrate how you can developed this site further. Price include everything (domain, photos, files, admin panel etc). Current webhost cames with security back up purchase which will be up till July 2012.

Please contact us if you are interested in any of these sites. If you’d like to see your site listed here, please visit the sell your website page and submit your site to us.

Notable Sellers

Most Active Seller
Seller: Sun Shine
Total Revenue: $4,740
Sites Sold: 32
Avg. Sales Price: $149

High Activity & High Avg. Sales Price Seller
Seller: warbar78
Total Revenue: $2,055
Sites Sold: 7
Avg. Sales Price: $294

Notable Website Sales

Highest Priced
Site: globetrooper.com
Price: $75,000
Bids: 8
Seller: todsul

Most Active
Site: StrongTestimonials.com
Price: $4,000
Bids: 95
Seller: FreeTheNoob

Our Watchlist

These are the sites that we were close to bidding on or buying but didn’t. At the time of posting this, they were still active auctions.

• proforums.org
• funnycorner.net
• beyondbeautybasics.com
• thetechaddicts.com
• sportsnub.com

Let Us Know What You Think

We’re still tweaking the content and format of this weekly update, so any feedback you have would be appreciated. Would you like to see more analysis or something else here? Please comment below if you have any ideas of what you’d like to see here.

Top Selling Websites

SOLD: $35,000
Established: April 2004
Unique Visitors/Month: 100000
Net Profit/Month: $2,000
Revenue Multiple: 17.5
Description: “Does what it says on the tin” – a job board for jobs in Egypt

Comments:
Hello, old friend.  A repeat sale here (seeing way too many of these at Flippa lately) for jobsinegypt.com.  I still think this is a site with solid potential.  It gets good search traffic, and job boards with traffic are pretty easy to monetize.  At 17.5 months net, it could be a pretty good pickup.

SOLD: $21,200
Established: June 2004
Unique Visitors/Month: 3000
Net Profit/Month: $800
Revenue Multiple: 26.5
Description: E-commerce site selling cat stuff

Comments:
Full disclosure: I’m not a cat person.  With that out of the way, let’s look at the fundamentals of this sale.  This is a site that sold for over 2 years net — why such a high multiple?  It’s an old site with an established link profile, but it currently ranks on the second page for its primary term (cat tree).  If the new owner is a decent SEO, he should be able to boost the site’s rankings pretty quickly.

It’s already shown the ability to earn well (back when there was less PPC competition for the term, allowing it to boost its traffic).  Using the historic PPC data (and conversion data from Google Analytics), you’ve got a roadmap for what to optimize for organically.

Beyond that, once the site starts humming again, you can buy the product wholesale instead of dropshipping it and increase profit margins.  With the right owner, this site will pay itself off in under a year.

SOLD: $19,500
Established: January 1970
Unique Visitors/Month: 0
Net Profit/Month: $0
Revenue Multiple: 0
Description: Domain sale

Comments:
Bought at SnapNames for $8k 10 months ago, sold for $19,500.  Not a bad turnaround for a name that has no clear content or monetization plan.  I could see this potentially being built as some sort of viral site, or a time waster (funny YouTube videos, etc).  I just don’t see how you get your 20 grand back on this in a reasonable time period.  This is a “tranny” domain, in my book.  It looks super hot (dictionary word, often used, gets decent type-in traffic), but once you undress the thing, you get an unwelcome surprise.  Good luck to the new owner… I hope you know what you bought.

Most Active Websites

SOLD: $21,200
Established: June 2004
Unique Visitors/Month: 3000
Net Profit/Month: $800
Revenue Multiple: 26.5
Description: E-commerce site selling cat stuff

Comments:
Our top seller is also the most active sale of the week.  3 bidders pushed this site from $8,000 to $21,200 in the site’s last day / overtime bidding period.  Lesson learned: setting a BIN too soon can cost you dearly (I know from experience).  You’d hate to miss out on a bidding war that nearly triples your sale price on the last day.

SOLD: $1,600
Established: November 2009
Unique Visitors/Month: 5000
Net Profit/Month: $0
Revenue Multiple: 0
Description: Job site with no supporting documentation

Comments:
I like job portals, but this one… not so much.  I’m not sure what got everyone excited enough about this site to submit 54 bids.  If you want to succeed with a job board, it needs to be narrowly focused on job type (radiojobs.com, for example) or on a location (philadelphiajobs.com).  Otherwise, you need a lot of money or an amazing link profile.  I just don’t see it with this site.

SOLD: $462
Established: November 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 500
Net Profit/Month: $100
Revenue Multiple: 4.6
Description: Collection of .info sites that were fraudulently promoted

Comments:
Fraudulent promotion — those are harsh words, but I feel pretty comfortable with them as descriptors of this sale.  These domains were promoted based on the potential broad-match search volume of the target terms (not the exact or phrase match, which are more reliable numbers).  The sites show traffic and earnings, but doesn’t note that the traffic came from PPC advertising.  It claims 100% profit, failing to deduct the cost of advertisements or hosting.  An all-around terrible sale.  I’m sure the new owner can’t be pleased with this acquisition.

Top Selling Websites

SOLD: $65,000
Established: January 2009
Unique Visitors/Month: 6990
Net Profit/Month: $3,903
Revenue Multiple: 16.7
Description: E-commerce store

Comments:
Someone clearly like what they saw on this one — the auction ended via a Buy It Now bid only a day after it was listed.  This was a weekend listing, too, so this one sold before a lot of people even had a chance to look it over.

The seller’s explanation certainly makes it look enticing – it’s a drop-ship e-commerce site, which is appealing for two reasons:

• Left as-is, it means a very limited amount of work required to fulfill orders.
• There’s potential for much better margins by purchasing wholesale and shipping direct (though this adds a level of complexity to the operation).  Still, the right buyer (with experience doing this very thing) would make out like a bandit with a site like this.

The site gets 3/4 of its traffic from search, which is a good sign — it’s not like people are going to stop searching for “bike racks” anytime soon.

It would have been nice to see more detailed info on the gross vs. net (and hopefully the buyer confirmed the stated margin in private), but all things considered, this looks like a solid sale.

SOLD: $30,201
Established: November 2003
Unique Visitors/Month: 0
Net Profit/Month: $0
Revenue Multiple: 0
Description: Precursor to Facebook, formerly owned by Mark Zuckerberg

Comments:
A $30,000 piece of history. This was an absolutely fascinating auction, as FaceMash.com, Mark Zuckerberg’s first successful social site came up for sale at Flippa. The site recently saw a huge spike in traffic as a result of being featured in the movie The Social Network. The sale of the site also received a fair amount of media attention, including coverage from Mashable and CNN (which syndicated the Mashable article).

What’s even more fascinating is what has been done with the domain after purchase — it now redirects to a parked page for international travel insurance (a keyword that has an average CPC of $7.21, according to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool). I suppose that’s one way to monetize the influx of visitors the site is getting courtesy of its recent publicity, though I’m sure Sedo’s ad feed partner might take issue with the targeting of the traffic. Still, I’d love to see what the CTR on this type of traffic might be.

SOLD: $15,000
Established: June 2002
Unique Visitors/Month: 20388
Net Profit/Month: $1,090
Revenue Multiple: 13.8
Description: AdSense / Affiliate resume site

Comments:
Bidding got hot and heavy on this site during its final day, and the site ended up fetching the $15,000 BIN price.  The site claims multiple streams of income (not all that well-documented in the listing) and receives a lot of organic traffic (including Google Images referrals, linking directly to resume images).

The big takeaway from this auction, for me, was the use of images to drive traffic.  It’s a nice reminder that some creative thinking can make a world of difference in gaining visitors — by making simple screenshots of resume docs, this site is able to gain WAY more traffic, thanks to Google’s universal search (integrates images into the main search results).

Most Active Websites

SOLD: $4,300
Established: January 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 2000
Net Profit/Month: $1,100
Revenue Multiple: 3.9
Description: Web hosting affiliate site

Comments:
I hope I’m wrong on this one, but I can’t help but feel that someone just got taken for 4 grand.  This site makes its money through affiliate sales of web hosting, which are incredibly lucrative — I used to dabble in this space and did fairly well.

The concern I have is that it’s not clear where the traffic is coming from and if it’s sustainable.  Beyond that, the site wouldn’t take any time to reproduce, and it doesn’t have any discernible link equity.  This looks like one of the worst purchases I’ve seen in a while.

SOLD: $600
Established: October 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 0
Net Profit/Month: $560
Revenue Multiple: 1.1
Description: Site selling facebook fans / likes

Comments:
As noted, Facebook fan services are still hot items.  This site was a re-list, and it pulled in the same sales price the second time around.  Want to see how big of a difference a site’s design, Flippa listing (attachments, description), and SERP rankings can make?  Compare this sale to the one directly below, which claimed around 50% revenue and sold for nearly 12 times as much.

SOLD: $6,999
Established: September 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 2100
Net Profit/Month: $836
Revenue Multiple: 8.4
Description: Site selling facebook fans / likes

Comments:
A much better site design, listing, SERP rankings, and attached data than sendfans.com allowed this site to sell for a much higher multiple.  At what point does the market become over-saturated with Facebook fan sites?  Eventually these guys are going to cannibalize each other.

Top Selling Websites

SOLD: $401,123
Established: November 1997
Unique Visitors/Month: 91405
Net Profit/Month: $273
Revenue Multiple: 1469.3
Description: 2-letter, PR8 biography site

Comments:
This auction certainly garnered a lot of attention (guest poster James Frost pointed out this auction as one to watch nearly a month ago.  It’s not often you see a 2 letter .com for sale.  It’s also rare to see a valid PR8 on the market.  In combination?  Basically unheard of.

This auction generated a lot of bidders (most active of the month) and even more gawkers – who happily offered up their thoughts on the impressive price fetched by this site.  Many thought this deal wouldn’t go through, but as of October 25, the whois record has been updated (to private registration).  Either the domain actually changed hands, the owner wants people to think the domain changed hands, or the owner’s tired of being harassed about the site.

An impressive sale that sets the new benchmark for net multiple (selling for 122.4 YEARS of net revenue).  Clearly the site was undermonetized, but that’s a crazy multiple to try to recoup.  Best of luck to the new owner, who I’m sure already has a great strategy in place — you don’t drop nearly half a million without a good plan.

SOLD: $56,000
Established: September 2008
Unique Visitors/Month: 360000
Net Profit/Month: $2,320
Revenue Multiple: 24.1
Description: Forum / News site covering Dell Mini & Streak

Comments:
I love auctions like this one — not because I’m interested in buying this type of site, but because you can learn a lot from a listing like this.  This site is monetized by AdSesne, Kontera, and affiliate links.

Kontera brought in only $436.88 for almost 1.2 million impressions — hardly seems worth the inconvenience to a site’s users.  As for affiliate income – the attached screenshot shows that the earnings are through Skimlinks, which looks like a really slick program.  It automates the affiliate link creation process.  You place regular links on your site, and Skimlinks automatically turns them into affiliate links.  Seems like an amazing option for forums.

The AdSense earnings look stable and strong.  With a good traffic history and varied income streams, it’s no surprise to see this site fetch 24x net revenue.

SOLD: $35,000
Established: May 2006
Unique Visitors/Month: 200000
Net Profit/Month: $848
Revenue Multiple: 41.3
Description: Movie and video game trailer site

Comments:
Another site fetching a really healthy multiple — Trailer Spy has a good, brandable domain name, solid search rankings, and a history of revenue.  In the right hands, the site could become substantially more profitable.

That said, I’d be concerned that the earnings data is skewed a bit by a one-time bump in app sales – especially given that the seller’s claimed monthly net is a 3-month average.  He provides an Excel spreadsheet showing 13 months of data, which yields an average monthly net of $433 — almost half the claimed earnings.  At 80x real monthly net, the buyer had better have some instant monetization improvements up his sleeve.

Lesson: Don’t just look at the number in the corner — verify the actual net before you bid.

Most Active Websites

(See above for full details)

(See above for full details)

SOLD: $1,050
Established: April 2007
Unique Visitors/Month: 1000
Net Profit/Month: $0
Revenue Multiple: 0
Description: Social media blog

Comments:
This is basically a domain purchase with the existing website thrown in.  The seller of this site claims 1,300 exact match searches for the phrase “social marketing strategy” – GAKT shows me 880 worldwide and 480 US-based… don’t trust seller’s to get these numbers right.  For someone who does social media marketing, this is a decent pickup.

Before we dive into things, I want to point out a few changes to the Snapshot.  For starters, you’re not going to have to scroll past the “most active auctions” to see the “top sellers” anymore. Frankly, bids don’t pay the rent.  You want to figure out how you can sell your sites for more money, so we’re giving you those listings first.

You’re also going to see a LOT more data going forward.  I’ve adjusted the “top selling websites” to include the 25 highest sales for the week, not just 5.  Both tables now show number of bids AND sale price, and I’ve added a column showing the revenue multiple for which the site sold.  I hope you like the extra data.

Starting next week, I’m also going to include some additional graphs highlighting some additional sales data / trending information.

The last change isn’t implemented yet, but it’s coming.  I’m going to start including sales results from other brokers and marketplaces.  If you’re a broker or run a marketplace, contact me and I’ll let you know about how you can submit your weekly sales data.

Now, with all the housekeeping out of the way, here’s a look at what sold this week:

Top Selling Websites

SOLD: $45,000
Established: May 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 0
Net Profit/Month: $0
Revenue Multiple: 0
Description: Domain sale

Comments:
Have fun losing your $45,000 (assuming this sale actually went through).  The IOC staunchly defends its trademarks, and I’d be shocked if they let this slide.  Paying $45,000 to get yourself a guaranteed UDRP (defined here) is not good business.  If you have the cash to drop 5-figures on a domain, don’t make it one with trademark issues (or 2 hyphens for that matter).  All around fail.

This leads me to another point — I hate to gang up on Flippa, since I just took them to task for allowing misleading listings on their site, but they should really step in on obvious trademark infringing auctions like this.

SOLD: $40,300
Established: November 2006
Unique Visitors/Month: 50000
Net Profit/Month: $13,800
Revenue Multiple: 2.9
Description: A site allowing people to locate old classmates

Comments:
This auction is the perfect example for how NOT to run a listing.  A site that claims 300,000 pageviews and nearly $16,000 per month in revenue sells for under 3 months net profit?  Why?

Simple.  The auction owner provided no data to verify earnings claims and the site raised more questions than he answered.  For a site of this purported magnitude, it shows an incredibly low link count (see Open Site Explorer data), and the owner did very little to limit the concerns others offered.  The Quantcast stats provided verify the amount of traffic, but don’t give much indication as to its quality.

The bottom line is this: if you want to sell your site for a high multiple, you absolutely must provide proof of the viability of your business.

SOLD: $12,500
Established: August 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 687
Net Profit/Month: $3,216
Revenue Multiple: 3.9
Description: Site selling Facebook fan acquisition services.

Comments:
Continuing the trend of social media fan purchasing sites in the “Top Sellers,” we close out the top 3 with Getty Fans.  This is clearly becoming a crowded market, so if you’re looking to buy one of these sites, you better be willing to continue working on the SEO or your revenue stream will dry up quickly.

This site has a nice design and good stats, so it seems like a decent investment provided they maintain traffic.  I’m always surprised when I see sites like this (selling a service or product that’s paid for online) not using conversion tracking.  As the new owner of this site, I’d love to step in knowing what marketing works and what doesn’t.

Most Active Websites

SOLD: $520
Established: April 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 600
Net Profit/Month: $25
Revenue Multiple: 20.8
Description: AdSense site

Comments:
Decent little AdSense site with a very limited earnings history.  More than a few things make me nervous about it.  Laying out 21 months net for a site with only 4 months of history (only 1 month over $25) is a bit risky.  It certainly doesn’t help build buyer confidence that there appeared to be some blatant shill bidding in this auction either, plus the owner didn’t supply verified Google Analytics data.

Still, the exact-match term shows 2,400 exact searches per month via GAKT with a $1.83 average CPC, so there’s potential for this to turn out favorably for the new owner.

SOLD: $3,000
Established: July 2008
Unique Visitors/Month: 17287
Net Profit/Month: $196
Revenue Multiple: 15.3
Description: AdSense site

Comments:
Interesting that in one of the comments, a potential buyer states, “With 87% bounce rate and average visit time of 28 seconds, you cannot earn 200 bucks per month.”  Quite to the contrary.  The purpose of a well-optimized made-for-AdSense site is to get people to leave the site… via ads.  You could reasonably have an insanely high bounce rate because everyone who comes to the site clicks on your ads.

The problem is that Google could now, or eventually will, leverage analytics and toolbar data to penalize sites that have such a high bounce rate (as that could indicate a bad user experience with the site).  It’s a risk you take when you buy MFA sites at high multiples.

SOLD: $780
Established: May 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 7238
Net Profit/Month: $144
Revenue Multiple: 5.4
Description: 8 Halloween costume affiliate sites

Comments:
I should have made a prediction in last week’s Snapshot that we’d start seeing costume-related sites showing up, and that they wouldn’t have more than 2 months of data coming with them.  Despite what I have listed above, this site did NOT sell for a 5.4 multiple.  This site will do 95% of its sales between August and mid-October.  So, the new owner probably paid a 15-20x multiple.

I’m not saying that’s bad — for each of the next few years, the site might do the same volume of business, meaning it’s a nice little investment.  Just be careful when you’re bidding on seasonal listings that you don’t base your max bid on a short portion of data.

Sites Most Watched by Buyers

Adsense – 68 watchers
Wordpress – 62 watchers
Autoblog – 55 watchers

* All stats based on Flippa activity

Most Active Websites

SOLD: $6,000
Established: June 2009
Unique Visitors/Month: 2,811
Net Profit/Month: $341
Description: Collection of 7 AdSense sites.

Comments: I know what you’re thinking — who knew a site about crawl space insulation could be so desirable?  On closer inspection, we learn that it wasn’t.  This auction was actually a collection of 7 sites that were earning revenue through AdSense.

They all look to be very thin sites (little content) and they use the exact same (hideous) template, but the stats definitely show some solid revenue.  This listing is a great example of providing lots of data to potential buyers (lots of videos of stats, etc) that likely played a big role in driving up the bidding.

A quick word of caution when buying AdSense sites — sites that are very thin and have high CTRs can be a risky purchase (if you don’t plan on improving the content quality).  Google has cracked down a bit on these “made for AdSense” type sites, and the last thing you want to have happen is to shell out big bucks for a site that’s about to get banned from its only revenue source.  I can’t say with any certainty, but it looks like that may have happened with these sites, as they no longer feature the CPC ads that were the primary revenue source.  Hopefully the (possible) banning happened before the sale finalized, giving the buyer a way out.

Established: May 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 1,476
Net Profit/Month: $124
Description: Collection of 50 AdSense sites.

Comments: Yes, you read that correctly — FIFTY websites were sold in this package for a total of just under $4k.  That’s 32x the claimed revenue multiple… but here’s the rub: that multiple is bogus.  If you’re ever looking to buy a huge collection of sites, like this one, you MUST take into consideration the cost of domain renewals against your gross earnings when calculating your net profit.

The owner of these sites listed a total monthly cost of $10 (for website hosting), but 50 domains at around $8 each for renewal means you have a renewal cost of $400 per year.  Divided by 12 means a monthly cost of $33.33, which is better than 25% of the claimed net.  If we take that out, these sites had a real net of $90.67, meaning they sold at 44 times the monthly profit.

Hopefully the new owner took that into consideration before making the acquisition.  44x for some new AdSense sites with weak domains is quite a bit aggressive for my liking.

Established: May 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 1,729
Net Profit/Month: $5,071
Description: A web-based course about flipping websites.

Comments: The only actual product-based business of the top 3 most active sites sells for the lowest revenue multiple by far, at just under 6x.  Information products, such as this one, tend to do very well at their launch and then fade off over time (some more drastically than others).  As a result, it’s understandable that this site wouldn’t fetch 30x revenue, but under 6x is pretty low given its consistent sales record over the past several months.

At $197, it’s a high ticket item, but the sales page is pretty compelling and it looks like there’s still a lot of potential for growth from affiliates.  In the hands of the right owner, this site could do monster business.  Its active forum and subscriber list also represents the potential to cross-sell items.

I’ll likely try to contact the new owner and get an update on his plans for the site and possibly review the product.

Top Selling Websites

Established: April 2004
Unique Visitors/Month: 100,000
Net Profit/Month: $2,500
Description: It does what it says on the tin — Job postings in Egypt.

Comments: It’s easy to see why this site sold for 30x monthly revenue.  It’s an established site in a niche (jobs) that’s easy to monetize and is evergreen — people are always going to be looking for jobs.  The site gets lots of traffic (100k uniques, 650k pageviews), ranks number 1 for “jobs in Egypt” and “Egypt jobs,” as well as many city-related job queries.  On top of all of that, it looks really ugly, which is easy to fix.

With a nice redesign and some additional marketing, revenue on this site could easily double or triple, at which point it looks like an amazing investment.

Established: February 2001
Unique Visitors/Month: 42,951
Net Profit/Month: $8,000
Description: E-commerce site selling knives.

Comments: This e-commerce site has seen better days but still has quite a bit of value.  Sales have trended downward since 2007, but monthly gross has remained over $20,000 and net profit is still significant at $8,000 per month.  At just over 7x monthly net, I think the buyer of this site got a great deal (purchased immediately at BIN), provided he has the back-end resources to handle order fulfillment and customer service.

The third highest selling site of the week was also one of the most active listings: KillerFlippingSecrets.com — my thoughts on this site were covered in the “Most Actives” section.

Types of Websites Most Watched by Buyers

AdSense: 68 buyers watching

WordPress: 62 buyers watching

Autoblog: 55 buyers watching