Jim, Not necessarily. Youtube would be a prime example. When google purchased it they were a money sink at 12+ million a month if I recall correctly. Projects have potential too -- sort of just like people. They're sometimes worthy investments. As to why someone would sell a project making money, well -- to revinvest it elsewhere or exit that industry, concentrate on another project, etc.
Very good point that I neglected to include. My wife and I have done that with real estate (raw land). We bought some land that at the time was seemingly worth very little. But we saw the potential, bought it, and happily are now retired on the very significant profit we made on the investment.
Exactly Websites are a lot like real estate when you think about it. You're purchasing a 'piece' of the internet, so to speak. With it you can sort of put anything you want on the page
That depends on the nature of the traffic. If my site relied upon search traffic for instance and was ranking high, I'd sell that $50,000/month website for $500,000 in a flash and re-invest either in to property or other projects that wouldn't rely on search engine traffic. It all depends.. I'd rather off-load the risk of 10 months future revenue on to someone else and cash-in. Pete
I would be careful here ..... Some are heartless scammers AND some just sell because of honest reasons. Your guts will answer that question for you. ... Listen.
People that make many sites can make them very quickly and efficently which enable them to flip them and make more money per hours of work then actually developing the sites themselves...
I develop proxies for the sake of selling them. Sure, I make a decent amount of money from Adsense, but they can be flipped quickly for a nice profit. I prefer to sell my proxies while they're young and can just take that money and use it to start up more.
I sell websites because I lost interest in developing them. Maybe there are people out there who have the interest. I buy websites because I see potential in them. I can see them grow and I'm interested to develop them. Easy
I believe that MySpace was not profitable and was making losses. When a white knight came, they just sell to cash out their investment.
Sites like myspace don't just make money, they cost a lot to maintain as well. There's a huge riskfactor involved in keeping it - because you never know whether the current success is going to continue. Also, the buyer can usually handle the risks and needed investments better then the original startup. Sites like that get made hoping someone will buy them. Some people like to start-up a project like that, but don't really have the type of personality needed for the day to day grits of maintaining it and keeping it going at a steady growth. The first year (or so) of a start-up is very different from the years after that - it makes sense to have a different type of owner. The types of sites sold on DP probably have very different stories behind them, though from the comments on this thread, I'd say not that different for some.
I think it is mostly people who have made money with there websites, but feel the money is about to go down, or not be as consistant like it used to be, so to get out of that before the value goes down to much, they decide to sell there website quickly. I have seen it happen like this a few times.
I do agree with you. That is why when I buy sites, I do not take into account past earnings because those are no indications of future earnings. So if I buy a site, I will evaluate its worth based on my terms, typically what I can afford to lose. Besides, if a web site earns money from selling permanent links, there may not be any more space left for the new owners to sell and taking down perm links is not a wise thing to do. Even with Adsense earnings, I noticed that some of my sites spikes in earning in some days and get nothing on the next. So if someone sells a site based on 10x the spike, the new owner may not be able to achieve that. Like I say, you can bring the cow to the water but you cannot make them drink. So the thing is that you can get traffic but you cannot make your visitors click on any advertisement.
1. No time to manage it 2. Lots of resources on your server 3. Laziness 4. Quick cashout 5. In need of money quickly 6. Build websites for fun then sell them
They just want the quick cash for whatever reason they may have at the moment. Though they could be making tons more as time goes on, they probably need the money fast. Also, depending on the site, they might not have time to run them.