20K/Year Site for Sale (5 year AdSense Average)

Hi everyone,

I need a quick cash for my other projects, so I am looking to sell one of my websites: www.groupsrv.com

Site is a simple Usenet to Web Forum site, with millions of Usenet topics and posts cached as forum posts and threads and I considered it up for a sale twice in the last 5-6 years, but never really sold it, as it generated very nice income.

Anyways, this website simply functions as a web based Usenet news reader (in form of a read-only forum) where you can read Usenet news groups with nothing except your web browser. This means that content of groupsrv.com forums is periodically synchronized with Usenet news groups.

This site made over $95 thousand in just last 5 years just from Google AdSense alone. This is between 1.Jan.2003 and 17.April.2009 (today).

5-6 year average; since the site started till now, is close to $50 a day.

Earnings are completely generated by AdSense and depending on how much traffic Google sends to my site, I'd see earnings anywhere between $10/Day to $60-70/Day. Some day/weeks are slow, some better good. I can never predict when it's going to go up or down. As you'll see from attached stats, it's always up and down... This year started slower, so far this year (1.Jan.2009 - 17.April.2009) site generated over $4000 from AdSense. But I've seen this happening before and it still close on an average of $20K/Year, some years it went to $30k, some years $15-20K. It's totally depending on how much traffic it receives each year.

Just so you know, this is not an adult site and it has a adult filter built in to filter posts with adult keywords when syncing with newsgroups. It gets rid off 99% of garbage and it can be easily adjusted to add more keywords in.
Site runs on a dedicated server which costs only $120/month. To run it, you'd also need a simple giganews.com account (approx. 5-10$/month), just to run the automatic Usenet to forum sync tool.

I am no desperate to sell the site, but I do need a cash right now, so I'd give it a week or so and see who offers more.

I can do a remote setup of the whole site for a winner on his own dedicated server. Additionally I offer 1 month of free support after a payment is received.

I can do a transaction through Escrow or in person. As prefered.

Current AdSense Earning Stats, showing only AdSense Content earnings, not the search earnings (those are additional %5-10 percent of content earnings daily):

Groupsrv.com 2003-2008 AdSense Content ($90,500):
http://www.groupsrv.com/groupsrv.com-adsense-2003-2008-70perc.res.zip

Groupsrv.com this Year, Content ($4000):
http://www.groupsrv.com/groupsrv.com-adsense-content.jpg

Groupsrv.com this Year, Search ($100):
http://www.groupsrv.com/groupsrv.com-adsense-search.jpg

Anyways, let me know your bids, if you have an offer which you think I won't be able to refuse, contact me by pm.

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Starting bid: $5000
BIN: will be announced 25th of April (unless there is offer through pm I'll accept ahead of time)

 

you got a ball park reserve? or is it open at auction =)

 

Starting bid: 5K, open auction.
Can be sold at any time between now and 25th of April.
Then I'll decide whom will I sell it to, or announce a BIN if there are no buyers interested.

 

Some answers for questions received from PM:

Site has no pictures, it's all just a text and even that is compressed when being served, so there is virtually no need for a huge bandwidth, basically any dedicated host will do. Even the cheapest serverbeach.com server will give you 10 times more bandwidth than this site needs.

Regarding recent drop in revenue, if you look at the stats, it happened many times before and always bounced back. Of course I can't guarantee anything, but look at the stats you'd see it going up and down. Not sure why google would send 13-15 thousand unique people in one day and 3 thousand the next. It's been going on like this for a year or so...

Script running a sync with Usenet and it is written in php using long time expired open source script, custom re-written by me.

Site has been registered in 2003, moved to godaddy.com in 2004 and is paid till 2013.

Site can run on Windows or Linux server.

No, there is no time required for managing the site, site is completely on auto-pilot. Site synchronization is fully automatic. I just check if it works, but I do not adjust anything and virtually don't spend any time whatsoever on the site. From time to time I get a mail about removing some post, which is easy to do if necessary.

 

Very interested. Any possibility of throwing up some proof/screenshots of both traffic, and adsense?

 

Screenshots include number of AdSense displays, divide it by two and you'd have almost perfect traffic stats for every day.

 

Site's alexa ranking is dancing like crazy.

What is the main traffic source and what is the second?

 

$5000 from me to start you off. you really shouldn't use alexa as a website ranking tool its rather useless in my eyes.

 

Dude In alexa Ranks is Like This... Iam intrested But How can i buy This ...Dude

Yesterday No data
7 day avg 327,365
1 month avg 95,858

 

There is a DMCA page and content removal procedure.
How often do you get DMCA notice?

isn't this slightly on the grey area of Copyright stuff?
You can say al news aggregators also do the same and all.. But this is direct caching of pages and pages of content..

 

I spoke to Google many times regarding this site, all concerns they had with it were removed. Adult filter implemented. Site is in green.
Regarding DMCA page and content removal procedure, please let me know more by pm, please.

 

Ill bid 6,000.00 - provided we can split the cost of a solid escrow company.

 

Please keep in mind $5000 is completely just to get this started.
Site made $4000 in the last 3 and half months.... You can see the stats,...

I've got some pm-ed offers already, and it seems that only if non of pm-ed offers will go through I will think about the offers bellow 10k. It's possible, but at this point I think I will not take anything below 10k.

Site is simply worth more, I can't guarantee, but I'm 99% sure, it'll make 10-15k by the end of this year and another 20k next year... No matter how bad it looked with this website in the past, in 5-6 years it always generated at least $20k/Year. So to sell sell it for $10k, I rather sit on it for another year. I am sure you'd do the same.

So while there is no harm to bid below $10k, because you'd simply never know how lucky you can get, there is an extr. slim chance I'd sell it for such money. No point.

Well, keep bidding. As soon as we get to above $10k, I'd start looking at the bids more seriously.
Also, just to get you some idea what I am looking for. I need approx. 20k USD in cash now.
That is 1year worth of income from this website.
So BIN would be approx 14-18 months worth of profits.
If we do not get there, I will simply keep the site and try to sell again next year or so, providing, I need the cash as I do now.

 

So far I have two preliminary offers of $10K.
I've got many private messages to setup a BIN, so here it is...
BIN: $20k
First person who offers the BIN, will take the site.
I would never sell it if I did not need the cash...

 

Attached are traffic screenshots:

August 2008 - April 2009:
http://www.groupsrv.com/4-19-2009 8-06-05 AM.jpg

Feb 2009 - April 2009 (Day by Day):
http://www.groupsrv.com/4-19-2009 8-58-58 AM.jpg

Again, I can't explain why are there these spikes in traffic, if I knew why Google sends 14 thousand people one day and 3 thousand another, I'd sell the site easily for 50K. Well maybe there is your opportunity...

 

So far, I've had 3 offers, one for 17.500, 16.000 and one for 13.500, most saying they would pay more if the traffic was stable.

In the mean time, I had time and I've figured out the reason for traffic ups and downs... well, at least I have a pretty good feeling I know the reason and fixed the problem, because as soon as I've done so, site traffic went from 2 thousand uniques to 10-12 thousand and keeps going strong. Profits are back to around $50/Day from Adsense.

What was the problem? I've used to filter adult keywords and realized only now, after well over a year or so, that the script I wrote was only scanning and deleting those threads where subject included a bad or adult keyword. I've fixed it by scanning and erasing posts also based on the body of the text.

I've expected the site to come back after the change in couple weeks, but it took only 3 days and site is going strong again.

Recent Adsense Stats:


Recent Traffic Stats:

 

I checked alexa one year ago, site was very good one year ago, after that no rank from July-Nov
and now its getting some traffic.

 

Well, lets wait for another year, as of now, selling it would not make much sense... profits are $50/day, which is quite nice and I am sure the problem with the traffic going up and down is solved.
I have to say, that while groupsrv.com is not nearly one of my best sites in terms of profit, this site does not require any work on my side and at around $1500/Month it has fairly ok AdSense profit to just keep it running.
This is not to say that I wouldn't sell it, because you can still contact me with offers, but your offer must be interesting enough for me to let it go.
At this point my plan to sell groupsrv.com site is postponed and will be revisited again in a year or so.

 

Did you stop the sale due to lack of Intrest ? it has been 15 Days since you put it for action.

 

There were 3 offers submitted by pm to me. But as I've explained above, I've considered to sale the site because of it's performance, but that problem is now fixed and there is no longer a need to sale the site.