The guy that listed his website for sale here knew what he was doing. The auction details show a potential bidder everything they need to know without overwhelming them with unnecessary information. The owner has produced a video showing proof of revenue and traffic statistics and in it he comes across as a very affable guy. His profile picture is fantastic. Look at his face and tell me you don’t trust him already! He looks completely dependable.
The site is pretty good too: 60 pages of well written content – a rarity on Flippa. The traffic is good: around 7,000 unique visitors per month, most of them coming via the search engines. Monthly revenue was reported to be $450 which is a very nice sum considering that no work is required to maintain it at that level. That $450 is mostly profit.
So far, this site looks like a Good Thing.
There was only one thing that bothered me about the revenue for this site. The seller did provide proof of earnings from somewhere that looked valid. However, there was no way that the owner could prove that those earnings came solely from the site being sold. It’s possible that the seller owns other sites in the same niche that display the same affiliate links and that also contribute to the same pot of money. I’m not alleging that he is doing that, only that it’s a possibility that we shouldn’t dismiss. The fact that the seller has had an affiliate relationship with the merchant that started years before the site was created lends credibility to the possibility of other streams feeding that revenue. Way before the site was started, the seller made substantial amounts of money by selling the merchant’s product.
This distrust has nothing to do with the seller and how he conducted himself – he couldn’t have been more helpful, and provided a shining example of how to manage an auction. I even got a “don’t let this valuable website slip away” email towards the end of the auction! The distrust arises purely because it’s not possible to prove a one to one relationship between the earnings claimed and the site being sold. Adsense, Chitika, Amazon etc all offer the facility to use channels to segregate data for different sites (and also different areas within the same site), but unfortunately the affiliate program that the seller was using didn’t have that facility. If only there was some way to uniquely identify the site being sold in the earnings control panel…
This lack of concrete proof didn’t stop the site being sold for a hearty $6,950 though. I think that’s a good price, assuming that the revenue is legit. If there was no affiliate product to push, I imagine that the volume of traffic that the site attracts, and also the nature of the content, would lead to some decent Adsense revenue.