Unique Content Sites - A flippa casestudy

[FWSJay]

* Disclaimer - I offer a Unique Content Site Creation Service, but none of these are mine. Just examples of what can be achieved with this type of site *

I have put together a little case study on several recent sales on Flippa. I looked at 8 sites that were very similar to what I produce, of course there are sales over all amounts, from $xxx and up, and I picked some of the better ones as examples here.

Some mistakes I saw were really bad WP themes, an easy fix obviously but will have put potential bidders off for sure. Another issue that affected the price of at least one of the sites I looked at was recent spikes in traffic or revenue. This raised lots of questions - when you sell yours try to get the timing right. The best sellers had been very stable.

These are all sales from the last 30 days, and they are all basic content sites running WordPress (one on blogger). They have unique articles of various quality from 'low' to 'expert'. As you can see from the following Averages over the set, Unique Content sites are performing well!

• $6200 Average Sales Price across the 8 sites
• $1750 lowest price and $15,400 highest.
• 30 bids on average
• 103 half decent articles per site
• 30 lowest amount of articles, 164 highest.
• 12 months old on average
• Sale price averages 14x monthly revenue

Now onto the individual listings, I linked the to the sales page so you can check em out for yourself.

iRepairHome.com $10,100 7x monthly revenue
This 5 month old site in the Home & Garden category had 21 bids, with no PR and pretty low quality content. It made up for that with a strong 48k uniques and substantial revenue at $1550/£975 a month. It has 300 low quality articles, and there are 430 pages cached in Google.
https://flippa.com/2966520-adsense-site-with-50-000-uniques-mo-making-1-554-mo

tennisforall.net $2,651 1x monthly revenue
With 50 high quality articles, and 72 pages indexed, this 6 month old PR0 site has 25,000 uniques and over $2,000 in revenue. There were a few questions about the recent spike in revenue, but it attracted 10 bids.
https://flippa.com/2962812-650-adsense-in-last-10-days-tennis-tutorial-blog-unique-content


bestadjustabledumbbells.org $10,000 20x monthly revenue
One of the highest quality content sites, with only 30 articles and just $450 a month in revenue, this site had 31 bids and finished for over 20x rev. It gets 4.5k uniques a month and was established only 6 months ago.
https://flippa.com/2966520-adsense-site-with-50-000-uniques-mo-making-1-554-mo


InternetTVReviewsSite.com $1,750 6x monthly revenue
This PR1 site only has 40 articles and at 5 months old is pretty new, still it had 44 bidders due to the quality articles and 13k uniques. With $275 revenue a month it went for 6x earnings.
https://flippa.com/2970336-pr-1-28-000-uniques-mo-276-mo-adsense-100-mo-amazon-no-reserve-xtras


cleanandsoberlive.com $15,400 16x monthly revenue
PR2, 70 extremely good articles and over $950 a month in revenue, this one had a massive 127 bids! Traffic is high at 30,000 uniques and it has been live for over a year.
https://flippa.com/2965724-1000-m-adsense-popular-addiction-recovery-site-passive-income-no-reserve


freecontactlensesinfo.com $3,000 4x monthly revenue
4,000 uniques, $700 a month and 50/50 unique articles out of 150 total, this site has been live a year and got 14 bids. The quality of the content is not the highest, and PR is 0.
https://flippa.com/2960755-contact-lenses-site-with-4-000-uniques-mo-making-700-mo


healthcave.com $2,001 50x monthly revenue
164 very high quality articles helped this one to $2000 despite rather low earnings of just $40 a month. Another plus is the 4 years old, PR2 and 4,000 uniques. This one had 7 bidders, and 230 pages in Google.
https://flippa.com/2964682-4-years-old-niche-health-site-400k-of-organic-traffic


HomeLoanInformation.net $5,000 10x monthly revenue
PR1, almost a year old and 100 pretty good quality articles, this site needed 1 bid to finish on 10x revenue. $500 a month from 3,500 uniques and with 300+ cached pages.
https://flippa.com/2962328-establish-loan-site-515-mo-stable-revenue-turnkey-brand-equity

So, MiniSites are working well from my research, how have yours been doing?

Jay

 

[Edwin]

I'm baffled why somebody would be selling for 1x monthly revenue, unless they already know that it's completely unsustainable traffic that will die out in days. Otherwise, just wait a month and pocket the same as they would have done selling through Flippa...

 

[stender]

Very dubious of some of those sites. Where does the tennis one for example get it's traffic from? probably spending high on adwords.
I can give you several examples of ministes earning bugger all. Unfortunately mine.

 

[FWSJay]

Yep, agreed @ the tennis one. There were questions about the rev and traffic, and that was reflected in the 1x monthly.

 

[Retired_Member38]

So, MiniSites are working well from my research, how have yours been doing?

You can't cherry pick a bunch of successful mini sites that have sold recently, and use that as proof that mini sites are working well.

How many failed sites did those people build in the same time period, how much money and time did they waste? I could just as easily pick their worst 5 sites and then present it as 'proof' that mini sites were useless.

I'm baffled why somebody would be selling for 1x monthly revenue, unless they already know that it's completely unsustainable traffic that will die out in days. Otherwise, just wait a month and pocket the same as they would have done selling through Flippa...

A high percentage of Flippa sales don't stand up to any real scrutiny. That tennis site doesn't even load right now so that tells you something iffy was likely going on.


You just can't buy a quality site for a few months revenue. If someone is offering you a site for 3,4,5, months revenue yet saying you don't need to put any work in then you probably need to run in the opposite direction. There will either be something fraudulent going on with the incoming traffic, the earnings, or both. Or the earnings won't even exist. Or they should have been attributed to a different domain that isn't included in the sale.

Or they've done something seo wise that is either temporary, spammy, or both. A lot of the sales are someone trying to abandon a sinking ship before it goes down - Flippa is notorious for it. Though it looks to me someone had a go at a dishonest sale from a sinking ship on Acorn too recently...

To take a recent one, look at https://flippa.com/2963613-premium-seo-site-42k-per-month-in-revenue-fully-outsourced-18-months-old. There seems to be a bunch of very valid questions being asked, and the answers are not really adding up.

 

[FWSJay]

All good points Monkey, and I agree a significant amount of investigation is needed before buying. Your right, I cherry picked and I'm biased. But the fact remains you can still make good returns on this type of site. There are loads of failures on there, plus plenty of dodgy ones too. But with the right approach they can work.
Jay

edit - good idea about picking the worst and seeing what went wrong...

 

[Blossom]

It would be much stronger for you to do case studies of how successful your mini sites have been. Even ones you've made for yourself.

 

[FWSJay]

I would love too, but unfortunately I have sold most of what I have built not too long after development. I'd have loved to keep them and go for the passive income but needs must.

My last decent public sale was a few years ago, $2k for basically an autoblog, your welcome to have a look.

Jay

It would be much stronger for you to do case studies of how successful your mini sites have been. Even ones you've made for yourself.

 

[Retired_Member38]

Maybe not a great one to use as an example, given its closed down now

 

[namealot]

I'm baffled why somebody would be selling for 1x monthly revenue,

Because an unbeknown distant relative from Lagos has died leaving them 100s of millions?

 

[Blossom]

I would love too, but unfortunately I have sold most of what I have built not too long after development. I'd have loved to keep them and go for the passive income but needs must.

My last decent public sale was a few years ago, $2k for basically an autoblog, your welcome to have a look.

Jay

*shrug* Best way to sell. Should always have a few of your own success stories live. If you really can't then your own customer testimonials are better than nothing.

Listing a few sales and saying 'This works as a concept' isn't really ideal. You don't know what happened after the sale, most of the smaller auto sites are scams on Flippa so you don't want to be associated with them anyway, and advertising good sales on Flippa will 1) potentially direct people to those sellers not you and 2) doesn't work for your target market. People here know about websites. You may as well take a book to a library. Your marketing in this example is better suited to very targeted Facebook groups and pages.

 

[FWSJay]

Good points blossom, and I have had glowing reviews from customers here - although there was an intention to drive a little traffic to my thread, it was mainly here to highlight that this type of site has poitential for many here - how many forum members have domains parked or under developed that cold be sold in a few months for £x,xxx?

Anyway, back to the sites I highlighted - I found an interesting post related to one of them. Its from the guy behind adjustable dumbells and is a really good casestudy of what they done, how they done it and how they turned a half decent domain into a $10k sale
http://www.cloudlivingjourney.com/how-i-built-a-niche-site-that-rank-1-and-made-93-32-in-38-days/

Use my service, some one elses or DIY, but most members have a domain or two that have the same or better potential…worth a try surely?

 

[cc976a]

It is interesting - but over here anyone seeing a site up for 2 months, 5k uniques per month and all from SEO would run a mile. We are though by nature a very negative bunch.

Across the other side of the pond things seem a little different, everything's a possibility and opportunity (even at £x,xxx and £xx,xxx investments)

Either these are good solid sites that can be built upon (like the US think), a house of cards that'll collapse as soon as Google close their big door upon (as us in the UK will think)......

.....or they are mostly scams to rack up the popularity of the sellers (as the skeptical amongst us will think!)

Not sure which hat I'm wearing

 

[cc976a]

On this guys article he mentioned he's paid for a link building service, and outsourced his SEO to Black Hat World......

as a buyer it wouldn't fill me with confidence!

 

[Retired_Member38]

You can't buy a quality site for < 6 months revenue - there really is no way around that simple fact.

 

[Murray]

So, MiniSites are working well from my research, how have yours been doing?

I'm not really getting the point of the original post in the first place.

All it proves (mini site or not) is you can spam rank a site for a while and make some quick money.

^ Nothing wrong with that (depending on your methods), but it doesn't mean anything specific about mini sites.

+ It also proves people either really like a gamble/or are just stupid enough to buy them on flippa.

There are a lot of stupid people in the world so..

Personally I wouldn't feel comfortable conning anyone.