Website Flipping Market Snapshot: 3-14-10

MOST ACTIVES

www.PublicDomainPayday.com – 88 Bids

This was a fun auction to watch with so many bids. It was the most active auction on Flippa this year with 88 bids and after looking over the listing, it’s easy to understand why it did so well. The website was just established in December 2009 but was generating over 2,500 unique visitors per month already with very little effort. It was generating over $200 in net monthly profits.

This was a classic example of a great website with tons of potential. For one, it was in an hot, evergreen niche – public domain products. Second, according to the seller there was virtually no promotion done of the site and yet it was generating over 2,500 uniques per month. Third, the website itself had stellar graphics and looked very professional and the ebook being sold on the website was high quality as well. Finally, the site was listed on PayDotCom and not ClickBank. ClickBank has far greater traffic and affiliates than PayDotCom. By simply adding the website to ClickBank and doing a little promotion, I suspect the monthly profits could easily double within 30 days. See auction here.

www.IPWorldMag.com – 59 Bids

This was an example of an under monetized auto blog. The was a PR3 website established in March 2005 with over 500 pages of indexed content. It was generating over 3,500 unique visitors per month and had a net monthly profit of only $50. The revenues could have easily been increased by simply tweaking and testing the AdSense ads – and by adding other monetization methods such as banner ads and text link ads. See auction here.

www.StubDB.com – 57 Bids

This was another interesting auction for me personally as I’ve often thought about creating an affiliate ticket-selling website myself. This is a very hot niche crawling with tons of buyers and sellers. Aside from that, there are a couple of things to learn from this auction listing.

Even though the site itself was only getting 300 uniques per month, the site was still generating close to $600 per month in net profits over its 10 month history (it was established in April 2009). I’m still not sure how an affiliate site with only 300 uniques per month generates that kind of profit, but assuming it’s all legit, that’s an incredible visitor value. That puts the value of every unique visitor at around $1.93! The take away here is that this auction proves that this is an incredibly great niche to get into as an affiliate and site flipper!

The other thing to learn from this auction is that you can go broad in this niche and still do well. Usually when you have an affiliate website that tries to appeal to everyone, as this website was doing offering tickets to just about every event under the sun, the sales aren’t that great. I would imagine you’d get more monthly uniques and better profits if you were more tightly focused. For example, building an affiliate website selling only tickets to NFL games. Either way, clearly ticket selling websites would be a great site flipping prospect for buyers and sellers alike. See auction here.

TOP SELLERS

www.Retweet.com – $250,000

This auction was the talk of the town. Even Flippa themselves blogged about it as it was the biggest seller on their marketplace this year. Probably the most amazing aspect of this auction was that the website had zero revenue! The buyer literally was buying a brand, traffic, and potential.

Retweet.com is a competitor to Tweetmeme, a service this website uses. It compiles the most retweeted posts on Twitter and also provides webmasters a button they can place on their websites for people to retweet their content.

Even though the site didn’t generate any revenue, it did generate 12 million visitors per month and had a page rank of 5. Given the popularity and continued explosive growth of Twitter, a website that piggy-backed on Twitter’s success with the kind of traffic it was getting, offered incredible potential to the buyer – obviously;) See auction here.

www.PenisAmp.com – $110,000

This was a great example of the “perfect” affiliate website. It generated all of its over 16,000 monthly unique visitors organically through well over 100 pages of unique content. More importantly, it generated roughly $8,100 in monthly net profits! If you want to know how to build an affiliate website the right way (and make a killing when you go to sell it) then you need to study this website!

Having said that, there is a huge red flag concerning this website that would have prevented me from buying it myself. With the new FTC regulations in place, this website is ripe for government intervention. The FTC likely has websites like this on its radar because it’s in a very popular health niche where consumers are easily scammed. I’m not saying this website was a scam. I’m just saying the buyer who purchased it better make some changes real quick to bring it into compliance with the FTC, or at least ride it out and hope they don’t come knocking. See auction here.

www.VCAO.net – $20,000

This auction was actually for a portfolio of websites and domains – 12 to be exact – that were between three and five years old. The 12 websites in total received around 75,000 unique visitors and generated roughly $1,200 in net monthly profits. The primary buy here, I suspect, was for the aged domains themselves and the traffic they were getting – not so much for the content on the websites themselves. See auction here.

TOP SELLING NICHES
This has become a common theme from week-to-week. The Internet Marketing (General) and Health (Fitness) niches continue to dominate. The third spot has been taken by the Gaming niche for a while but was bumped last week with the Gadgets niche.

MOST ACTIVE SITE FLIPPERS

These are folks that are obviously selling on a regular basis. And if they’re doing this on a regular basis, then they must be doing well or they wouldn’t bother. You should check out their profiles and see what they’re doing. As a buyer you may find a site that interests you and as a seller, you can see what type of site flipping business they operate to give you some ideas;)

*You can view the profiles for these sellers by clicking on their names but you need to be logged into your Flippa account to view them.
mimmo123 – had 10 sites for sale
htmlserver – had 6 sites for sale
jomanz1717 – had 6 sites for sale

TYPES OF WEBSITES MOST WATCHED BY BUYERS

This metric provides a lot of insight on the website flipping market. These are the types of websites that buyers are watching. In other words, these are the types of websites that buyers are interested in buying today. As a potential seller, this is great information because if your website falls into any of these categories, be sure to tag them as such when you list them. And if you’re a short-term flipper, these are the types of websites you should be building for sale.

Ecommerce: 29 buyers watching
WordPress: 23 buyers watching
AdSense: 17 buyers watching