Today one of my old favorite sites has
hit the auction block on Flippa.
The reserve price is at $170,000.00 with a Buy it Now for $225,000.00.
Here are some interesting stats from the listing:
- The auction is listed Listed on the Auction it says the site makes $1667 in gross revenue.
- Pageviews (3 month avg) 35,923
- The Alexa traffic rank is 46,061
- The forums have had 2 new posts in the last 2 weeks.
- The site did not make a blog post from March until May (its made a couple in recent days).
The Valuation:
I have been hit up by about 5 people so far this morning and I am sure I will get hit up by more so I thought I would just post what I have been telling people.
Guy Kawasaki one time told me there are 3 times to sell a site. To early, just right, to late.
I have been on about every side of that. With NextPimp I sold the site waaaaaaay to late. With AuctionAds I sold the site to early. What are you going to do.
But I digress...
Ok so with this site lets just break down some numbers.
First of all the gross revenue is listed. People forget someone is going to have to run this website. So what are you going to pay that person?
Just to break even you can't pay someone over 24k/yr or $12 a hour. That would be fulltime of course.
I think to really blow this site out to become an authority again you would have to have a full time person. Blog updates, forum moderation, selling advertising, JV partnerships. All that shit takes a TON of time.
Lets pretend you get the site profitable after paying someone (or yourself) to run it. If you double revenue the site would be doing 24k a year in profit which I don't think should be THAT hard.
Being the site has been on a MASSIVE downtrend and your taking a total gamble I would value it around 10-20k.
But that is just me... if I was to buy it. And I would turn it into a fricking nascar with ads.
The real value is the database of people interested in SEO. But being that the site has been neglected for SO long you can't really contact those people out of the blue....
I would guess 99% of the existing traffic is coming from Google (especially looking at their compete and Alexa stats) looking for keywords to help their SEO. But from what I can see the matches are from years ago (sometimes 5-6 year ago). So the value to users is going to be very limited.
Again I would pepper the shit out of it with ads.
I think its a lost cause to being the site back as the authority it once was. I have tried with previous sites that were crushing it.
But maybe I am way off. Where would you value this site and what would you do if you owned it?
