

Websites That Did Really Well on Flippa (and What We Can Learn From It) - toumhi
http://www.sparklewise.com/7-websites-that-did-really-well-on-flippa/

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sheff
Flippa has a lot of sales listings of somewhat questionable value. However the
"Just Sold" section ordered by descending price is a good place to look for
valuable business niches, as it filters out a lot of the spammier listings :
[https://flippa.com/just-
sold?sort_col=price&sort_dir=des...](https://flippa.com/just-
sold?sort_col=price&sort_dir=desc).

The Experienced People forums are also a treasure trove of information about
dodgy website sellers : <http://experienced-people.net/forums/forum.php> .

~~~
BryanB55
I dont know, even the link you provided... the first few are something about
"rx" sounds like cheap knockoff drugs from Mexico, "clickbank affiliate",
affiliate gambling site, "makecashtakingsurveys.biz"... These all sound like
the scum of the internet type of sites to me.

~~~
sheff
You're absolutely right, there is still a lot of dross in there without a
doubt - probably because very few people sell their decent, stable, money
making sites.

I use it as more of an idea generator and its one of the few places where you
can get some indication of revenue levels for particular types of sites .

------
dangrossman
I've sold a half dozen sites on Flippa (and the SitePoint Forums before Flippa
was spun off from that). The largest single sale was $90,000 for a site
selling a WordPress plugin I developed.

It doesn't matter how much junk is also for sale on Flippa as it's all very
filterable and searchable, and those filters and searches can be saved. I have
them saved as daily e-mail alerts so I just skim the new listings matching my
criteria once a day.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Awesome to hear that you're making good use of filters & saved searches...
we'll be making those even easier to use going forward.

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amoore
Great article. I love to see what sites do well on flippa, but some of them
boggle my mind. Perhaps it's because not all buyers or sellers are rational,
but I have to also think that there are schemes and scams that I'm not aware
of at work there. I'd love to hear explanations for some of the sales I see
there.

Flippa is a marvelous wasteland of make-money-fast sites being marketed as
make-money-fast schemes themselves. Although there are diamonds in that rough,
surely there is another place where people go to buy or sell more established,
traditional web-based businesses. Where is that place?

~~~
TomGullen
From my brief browsing in the past its pretty obvious to me there's a lot of
'rough' and hardly any diamonds. Avoiding the scams is a skill in itself.

I don't think there is much possibility of making a success of a similar site
for bigger cap web businesses, Thy are far less liquid assets and private
sales would probably always be preferable to all parties involved once you're
past a certain value threshold.

I really am not a fan of flippa, they have a great concePt and executed well
yet they took the easy and (short term) more profitable route of allowing any
old crap in. It's much like a lot of new online advertising platforms, there's
a serious trust issue with all of the one ive seen where filtering out the
scams, junk and misrepresentations is so time consuming and riskier it becomes
not worth the time. I want to see flippa for quality small liquid sites (do
they even exist and if thy do why would they be sold anyway?) and advertising
platforms I can trust. Then I can start using these services.

~~~
epdotnet
Tom, as a long term watcher of website marketplaces, and the owner of the
experienced-people forum, I completely agree with your assessment. Flippa did
go down the route of quantity (more profit in listing fees) rather than
quality. We did advise them when they started up that this would affect trust.

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BryanB55
Crazy to see how much these sites are going for... I'm always interested in
finding some niche sites for sale but Flippa always seemed so..spammy to me.
It seems like all of the sites on there are for article writing/spinning,
reverse telephone look up, link building, spyware removal or some other
cheesy, no value-added type of site. I'm sure people are making money on them
but I just don't feel comfortable adding another one of those sites to the
internet... maybe it's just me.

~~~
kls
_Crazy to see how much these sites are going for._

If you look at the time it took to sell the numbers are actually pretty dismal
depending on how much effort and money the owner put into the sites. But for
me and the time I spend on projects 30k over 8 months or $200k over 6 years is
a horrible return for efforts. That being said, I build very custom web-apps
where these may be build a site and get traffic kind of sites.

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flipfilter
In the UK we have a saying, where there's muck there's money!

It's an interesting article - I wrote a more indepth version of the same thing
three weeks earlier

[http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2012/02/22/lessons-in-fast-
gr...](http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2012/02/22/lessons-in-fast-growth-for-
internet-businesses/)

Flippa has good and bad, but I doubt it would be any other way anywhere else.
It goes back to the idea of what's value for one person isn't necessarily
value for another.

We run the A-List Newsletter which reviews sales of web businesses both from
Flippa and from private brokers (<http://www.flipfilter.com/a-list>) with a
value generally above $10K. Each month I look at the top five sellers for that
month (in terms of sale price) and the most active (in terms of bids). The top
five can vary wildly; in February it seemed they were all Clickbank Sites that
sold products in the MMO niche and followed the same formula of launch to a
pre-established list, marketing the hell out of upsells and downsells, selling
the business then using the initial list (now much larger post launch) to do
it again.

The most active however are pretty much always sites that sell Internet
Marketing Services - for example, a site which sells Facebook likes or one
which offers Social Bookmarking services. Their final selling price is always
around the $1 - $2K mark and they often end with in excess of 50 bids despite
only being a few months old and having no real barrier to entry (ironically,
the same sellers will often sell the same templated site again under a
different banner a few weeks later). IMO, the sad part is the people who buy
these sites tend to be new to the industry and no real information to tell
them that this isn't a the easiest way to get a return on their investment.

There's going to be good and bad at every price range, and likewise types of
sites which tend to do well (Adsense with earnings history, Clickbank
affiliate sites, Email Newsletters, anything with a big list in the MMO
industry) and things that don't (Web Apps with complex backends, Ecommerce
with physical products, News sites which require 'real' journalism) but that
doesn't mean the sites which don't sell well aren't worth something to the
right buyer.

This isn't defending the truly bad stuff or the sometimes fraudulent sellers
that you occasionally see on there - it's going to happen for reasons that
probably boil down to resources, but if even 10% of Flippa listings based on
the 1,000s it has are 'good' then it still has more to offer than a site with
80% good but only 15 listings.

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moses1400
I put CenterNetworks on Flippa about 15 days ago - starting bid at $10k. So
far no bids, 13 people "watching" the auction. I've had a few private messages
about stats but that is it so far. There are still 15 days left in the
auction.

------
epdotnet
Thanks to sheff for mentioning my non-profit experienced-people.net forum
which discusses website purchases and sales. This site has sent us a fair bit
of traffic yesterday :-)

Flippa is one of the many avenues one can use to sell a site or find one to
buy. It has a high profile but in dollar terms accounts for a small proportion
of online businesses sold. However, it's a popular location for webmasters and
lower end websites and I recommend the flipfilter.com site for stats on the
Flippa marketplace.

My own analysis is somewhat different. As I commented in the sparklewise blog
(the OP link), figures you see in Flippa are deceptive. The $200K site
mentioned at (D) in his blog post was sold a month later by the same seller
for $40K. The chances are the first sale didn't go through. That's not an
isolated case. I would advise that readers exercise caution, it's easy to get
carried away with the large figures :)

I've been doing my own analysis of some Flippa stats (<http://experienced-
people.net/forums/showthread.php/6331>) and the numbers are just not adding up
for me.

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stfu
I could see a market for information like that. Some form of subscription
service, where current Flippa auctions are evaluated on the basis of M&A
factors.

~~~
epdotnet
I tested the demand for this and my experience is that there aren't enough
buyers willing to pay for the kind of expertise required to curate listings
based on some basic due diligence checks, filtering out obvious fakery, and
using standard business valuation models to suggest a price range for sites
being auctioned in Flippa. You've got to bear in mind that it's very time
intensive work to get to the real figures. For example, most sellers don't
deduct a nominal cost for their own time. To "normalize" their accounts you'll
have to first decide how much of time/expertise is required to run their
business and what that would cost.

~~~
stfu
It really depends on the level of sophistication. The target market could be
anything from people looking to become self employed all the way towards more
serious investors who might want to consolidate multiple sites under a common
theme.

I personally love for example reading the monthly updates on
<http://www.dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm> . They are quite helpful to get a
realistic approach towards the domain market. I am missing something like this
for projects and would be even willing to pay some fee for "hard facts".

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LiquidSummer
God damn it, when I was ~14 years old I had a very popular anime website (~3M+
uniques every month), but I shut the website down because I got bored. God
damnit, I wish I knew about flippa back then! I don't even own the domain
anymore...

~~~
nates
I had an Anime site a few months ago that we listed as the management was
contemplating selling due to PIPA/SOPA. We got no bids. We were getting
similar stats. Now one of the original 4 Executives is the only one in charge
and he merged the site with another site.

~~~
LiquidSummer
Damn, unlucky man. What do you think about Crunchyroll? I heard Shinji made a
few million dollars last year.

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danso
Could there be more elaboration on the $200,000 sale for list-of-
companies.org?

I know that highest sale value doesn't make it the "best" of the lot, nor is
that what the OP is saying...but I don't get what value there is in that site
except perhaps as a search-engine-flytrap...it doesn't seem to have much use
for humans.

For example, here's a list of luggage companies: <http://www.list-of-
companies.org/Luggage_Bags_Cases/>

And it appears to be an aggregation of websites claiming to sell luggage, with
no rhyme or reason to the order.

~~~
toumhi
Hey danso, OP here.

The evaluation is a bit light for some of the websites I've covered. If this
one sold for $200.000, it means there are other kind of directories that can
be very profitable, either as your only website or as part of a portfolio of
niche earners. Not something your average software developer will think of I
guess. However, I imagine directories can be a bit labor-intensive (I don't
have one myself).

I wanted to show that for software developers it's also possible to make
websites that are not traditional webapps. There are lots of profitable
websites out there.

