TravisVS Under 
The data for the Most Actives, Top Sellers, Top Selling Niches, and Most Active Site Flippers is based on the market activity at Flippa.com. As the largest and most popular marketplace for site flippers right now, the market activity there provides valuable insight on what people are buying and selling.
MOST ACTIVES
www.TheCanadianTeacher.com – 36 Bids
SOLD: $4,100
Established: February 2000
Unique Visitors/Month: 9,000
Net Profit/Month: $245
Description: Resource website for Canadian teachers monetized by AdSense and ClickBank affiliate sales.
Comments: This website was a sleeping giant if you ask me. This was a 10 year old website that had a PR5 and was listed in the Dmoz and Yahoo! directories. The forum for the site had over 6,000 members and there was an email list of around 11,700 subscribers. Despite all this, the site was generating less than $250 per month. Anyone that is good at email and/or forum marketing would be able to significantly increase the revenues for this site. See auction here.
www.BeachTowelsClearance.com – 36 Bids
SOLD: $596
Established: April 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 710
Net Profit/Month: $80
Description: Niche blog on beach towels monetized by AdSense and Amazon product sales commissions.
Comments: Who would have thought that a very basic, no-frills startup website about clearance beach towels would sell for almost $600! I personally don’t get it as I can’t imagine this would be a very lucrative niche but what do I know…lol. I will say this, I do like how the seller put together her auction listing. It is very detailed and has all the information you’d ever need – including testimonials from past customers, BIN bonuses, and a link to sign up for her private list. If you sell startups, take a look at her auction to get some ideas on what to include in your listings. See auction here.
www.QuizzNotes.com – 33 Bids
SOLD: $2,500
Established: March 2009
Unique Visitors/Month: 44,000
Net Profit/Month: $68
Description: Site with user submitted quizzes and questionnaires for Facebook monetized by ads.
Comments: This seller “violated” every rule in the book when it comes to posting an auction and yet his listing still generated 33 bids and sold for a respectable $2,500. The headline was terrible and the listing itself was very brief. The tags he used were also useless as nobody was looking for any of the tags he used (although “social networking” did have some popularity). What was purchased here was potential. The site has over 44,000 unique visitors per month and has a Facebook fan page with over 10,500 fans – with the demographics being 80% female between the ages of 13-24. That is the key stat – the buyer knows exactly who his market is. As long as he knows how to monetize this demographic, the $2,500 purchase was probably a great deal. See auction here.
TOP SELLERS
www.PhotoshopStar.com – $42,500
BIDS: 8
Established: June 2006
Unique Visitors/Month: 270,000
Net Profit/Month: $2,000
Description: Adobe Photoshop tutorial site monetized by AdSense and BuySellAds.
Comments: The seller previously had this site listed for sale as part of a bulk sale where he was offering all of his websites for sale in one auction. The bidding only went to $46,000 and ended without a winner. Obviously the reserve wasn’t met but that was probably a blessing in disguise for the seller as he figured out he could probably make a bunch more money selling the sites off individually. Just one of his websites (the one highlighted here) sold for $42,500 alone! The lesson here is if you own several high-valued websites, DON’T sell them as a portfolio of sites. It’s too much for the average buyer to manage. Sell your websites individually to attract more buyers and more bids:) See auction here.
www.UrgentCashTillPayday.co.uk – $28,000
BIDS: 3
Established: April 2010
Unique Visitors/Month: 3,500
Net Profit/Month: $4,100
Description: Online payday loans business monetized via affiliate commissions.
Comments: Payday Loans are hotter than ever right now given the current state of the economy. This site was only two months old but was already generating around $4,000 in net monthly profits. The site had more than 1,000 payday loan applications filled out with just 3,500 visitors. That’s a 29% conversion rate! If you are in this niche, you should study this site to see what they’re doing to get that kind of conversion rate. See auction here.
www.StraightSilver.com – $25,000
BIDS: 1
Established: October 2008
Unique Visitors/Month: 7,000
Net Profit/Month: $5,000
Description: Silver bullion business.
Comments: As an investor in silver myself, I had a passing interest in this opportunity. What ultimately scared me away – and what I think scared other buyers away as well – was the amount of expenses and work necessary to run this business. This business required that you buy and maintain the inventory yourself (i.e. the actual silver). And the way the current business was setup, all the coins were custom made so you had to have an eye for coinage design or outsource it. The seller’s terse responses to the comments didn’t help his cause either. I believe it is for all these reasons why this business only sold for 5X the monthly net profit. Any other ecommerce store of this caliber that was easier to manage would have sold for 2-3 times more money. If I would have been the seller of this site, I would have sold directly to an existing precious metals dealer. That would have been another way to get at least $50,000 for it. Flippa wasn’t the right avenue for this type of ecommerce store. See auction here.
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.
WordPress: 47 buyers watching
Adsense: 43 buyers watching
Autoblog: 42 buyers watching
and Top Sellers For Every Month!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
http://www.urgentcashtillpayday.co.uk/ – this was a relisting, the site “sold” in the previous auction for $52,600, almost for double the amount as this one. Any thoughts on this?
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Nice catch. I was going to mention that in my write up but then for some reason I left it out. I am surprised that when the seller relisted it sold for half what it did the first time around but then again the first deal fell through (presumably the buyer couldn’t come up with the money) so technically it didn’t sell for $52,600. Someone simply made a bid for that amount – no money was actually exchanged so no value was really established.
Having said that, there were other bidders who were bidding in the $40,000’s. Why didn’t the seller approach the other bidders to see if they would be interested in buying at their highest bid? And why didn’t they step up and bid the site up to that amount the second time around?
Another question I have is why did the seller start the bidding at $41,000 the first time around and then drop it to a starting bid of $26,000 the second time around – especially when there were bidders bidding in the $40,000’s the first time?
Personally, I think the sale price the second time around is more in line with the site’s true value given that the site is so new and doesn’t have an established history of earnings.
Travis
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