

How are websites making money? - lesterbuck
http://www.slideshare.net/Flippadotcom/how-do-websites-make-money-16613130

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pedalpete
This isn't how websites are making money, this is how people are making money
selling websites. Completely different, and to me, much less interesting.

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marshray
"All established websites" sold over the two-year period of 2011-12 amounted
to "almost $30 million"?!

That's less than three Chipotle Equivalent Units (CEUs).

"the price of CMG stock pre-earnings was valuing average revenue per store at
$10.5 million" [http://seekingalpha.com/article/756011-you-mean-to-tell-
me-c...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/756011-you-mean-to-tell-me-chipotle-
revenue-missed-by-12-burritos-per-day)

* View-source to read the text of the article. Note the comments about "googleoff" and "googleon" :-)

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snikch
They've referring to all "established websites" sold on Flippa.

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ChuckMcM
So I thought it was an interesting look at what I'd consider 'second tier' web
sites. But really they are filling the role that is the 'enthusiast' magazine
or newsletter.

What this analysis misses is a storefront for a painting company. That is all
about lead capture and closing the deal. Harder to quantify. Well, easier for
the store but harder for third parties to quantify.

So clear business models for client relationship management and review type
editorial. Less clear on 'newsy' type sites or reference sites. Game/App as
web service seems pretty clear too as a model.

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Matsta
LOL @ Flippa.com

Seriously that site has been going downhill ever since they rebranded from
SitePoint Marketplace several years back.

I remember when they first launched, they used a screenshot of one of my sites
on their homepage for at least a year without permission, and this site was
listed on SitePoint before they deleted it and refused to say why.

Pretty much ever since the whole site is full of scammers. People just put up
bogus sites claiming to sell Facebook fans, Youtube views and Twitter
followers, that somehow make $5k a month and the domains are barely 30 days
old.

Then they upload 'legitimate' Google Analytics screenshots, which Flippa never
check and then someone stupid enough to buy the site pretty much gets a $10
domain in return for $10k (they take a greedy chunk off every sale of course
so they couldn't care less about anyone else)

I would guess that a good percentage of the data they use is complete bogus so
I wouldn't take those stats seriously.

Anyway here's a nice Google search if you want to look into this further:
<http://goo.gl/qfVAW>

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thematt
The problem with this analysis is it's based largely on numbers provided by
unscrupulous people trying to game SEO.

Speaking as someone who has purchased multiple sites off of Flippa -- I view
any revenue numbers with lots of skepticism. The majority are spammy sites and
the remaining sites that are legitimate have often faked/inflated their
numbers to entice purchasers.

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unreal37
If median revenue per month is only $133, they suck at gaming it.

~~~
bigiain
I dunno - if you've got things set up so you can run 100 of them
simultaneously…

(And I'd guess there's a bit of VC-like speculation going on too - people
trying to not lose too much money on the 99 "failures", but making up for it
with one single 4 or 5 order of magnitude outlier success.)

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DocFeind
I was expecting a load of manure, but... the technical data and information
was actually very insightful. I would love to see a longer running historical
revision of this, say from the late 90s til now. Once upon a time everything
was static and monetization almost unheard of. Oh how far the web has come...

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extesy
Here's a more complete set of various online revenue models:
[https://hackpad.com/Web-And-Mobile-Revenue-
Models-(final)-Eg...](https://hackpad.com/Web-And-Mobile-Revenue-
Models-\(final\)-EgXuEtSibE7)

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Datsundere
I'd assume mostly advertisements. Sites like Gizmodo get money from big
corporations to review or write articles. Once the sites get big, I think they
get free prototypes to test them and review them.

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arekp
It's interesting to compare the findings with website popularity:
<http://5000best.com/websites/>

~~~
est
I couldn't find some major non-US sites

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arekp
It lists only websites in English, and the ranking is US-centric.

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danso
The first example it mentions, wheretogetmovingboxes.com, has expired:
<http://wheretogetmovingboxes.com/>

I was wondering, though, how it did for the search "where to get moving
boxes"...its PageRank was 1...I'm assuming that with only 300 monthly uniques
(compared to the number of people who must ask that question on a daily
basis), it didn't do well.

Yet it made $70 a month out of just 300 visitors? That's a pretty high
conversion rate.

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garysieling
I did some analysis once about a year ago, and found that a large number of
domains were inactive.

[http://garysieling.com/blog/one-third-site-auctions-
abandone...](http://garysieling.com/blog/one-third-site-auctions-abandoned)

It's possible this analysis is over-estimated (e.g. could be defects in the
scraping process) but I was surprised even just checking domains randomly how
many were later abandoned.

I suspect that there are a lot of sites that use various techniques to fake
their numbers; if this gets the purchaser banned from adsense it makes a site
in the lower price ranges basically worthless.

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batgaijin
Are adsense bans forever? Are they tied to an identity or a credit card?

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Rinum
As far as I know they are pretty much permanent. I was banned about 2-3 years
ago and I have sent an appeal every year. My appeals are always rejected.

Accounts are probably attached to your identity (SSN, domain, etc.)

The only way to get another adsense account is if you form a new legal entity.

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nso
I found that the only way out of the Google perma-ban was to grow large enough
to have them call you instead. Their representative - apparently surprised by
the fact that my site was banned - clicked a couple of buttons and the ban was
removed. The account even had the hundred dollars that was there when I was
banned years earlier.

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codexon
How big do you have to be?

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nso
I don't want to be too specific, but the the site yields Google more than 10K
USD a year -- which I guess is incentive enough. They still keep pestering me
about putting more ads up, tho.

