2-Year-Old News Site with 13,000+ Articles For Sale To Top Bidder

Indyposted.com, a news and news aggregation website that has existed for nearly 2 years is up for sale.

The site has been very consistent in terms of posting with stories going up single day since the site was launched on September 4th 2009.

Site Traffic has fluctuated quite a bit lately with a site average of 100,000 - 300,000 pageviews. Applying for Google News if accepted should help dramatically increase numbers.

Avg. Earnings are as followed (on a monthly basis)

Yardbarker: $350 - Approx 10 months left on an advertising contract that is paying high CPM rates. Plus sports articles are syndicated into their network which includes Fox Sports.

Technorati Media: $250
Outbrain: $80
Google Adsense: $50
InfoLinks: $50
ValueClick Media: $50

Total: $830
The site is hosted on Rackspace Cloud and costs $149 to maintain, however the site could just as easily be hosted on Wired Tree with a VPS for $50 based on traffic numbers (I host other sites on Rackspace which is why it is there). The site also includes Amazon S3 image hosting for an easy transfer ($10 a month approx. for image serving).

Profits on Average should sit around $500

We are looking for Profit X 12 months = $6000

As part of the deal I am currently going through and deleting all broken links from the past based off Broken Link Checker.

Alexa Rank: 98,375
US Alexa: 47,952

If the reserve price of $6,000 is met I will stay on and write for the site for 3 months and our other co-founder Dan will also remain writing for the site for that period.

The site is Wordpress powered and I can consult on any issues you have.

Email me: with more questions or posting them on the forum.

 

Hey James, how much time does this site take to maintain, do you have someone doing this? Are the 'writers' on http://www.indyposted.com/writers-and-contributors/ being compensated for their contributions? Will they be staying on? Are the Facebook and Twitter pages/account being transferred with the sale also?

 

Hi SCLocal,

The only writers maintaining the site at the moment are myself and Dan. The site can be maintained with human aggregated content with 2 hours work a day. Typically 7-10 stories are put up each day, of course if you get in Google News the more you post the more traffic you will receive.

Yes the Twitter and Facebook pages will both transfer with the sale (Twitter is just about to cross 2,000 followers and Facebook at 500).

I have a celebrity writer who will post at $2 per post and the site lends itself well to finding free writers if you add an "about the author" box so they can get credited with their writings.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

 

I should also mention the site was just pushed up to a PR 5 Google Rank.

 

This an autoblog? Alexa has dropped WAY down over the last few months. Site banned by google news?

 

Hi McDoug, site is not in Google News. It is not an auto blog, all aggregated content is hand written. I simply haven't had the time to manage the blog as it needs to be managed. I use to put up 10 posts over a two hour period and we would have 15-30 posts per day, if you subscribe to the daily email feed now you will see closer to 3-7 stories a day being posted. We had a larger writing pool as well (4-5 active writers), however with my time constraints from other positions it became difficult managing a bunch of writers and working with my clients, who quite honestly pay me a lot more than even the small amount of time I spent managing the site.

Do a copyscape and you'll see the content is not auto blogged. There are about 25 or so press releases from PRNewsWire and BusinessWire which they reached out to us for posting, but everything else was written by our writers, including quite a few Top 10 articles.

James

 

why has traffic dropped so much? Where did the traffic come from before...tell the truth now

 

CanadianBacon,

I already explained this above, I simply haven't been writing as many articles, nor have any other writers. The site has 15-20 articles a day, sometimes up to 30 and those numbers dropped drastically down after we went to maybe 10 in a day, many times less. You can verify that fact by browsing the sites archives and seeing that article numbers are drastically down.

Honestly it's a great site and if I don't sell it I'll just maintain it for the time being with the hopes of having more time for it in the future.

I am the editor for another big site and simply don't have the time to give the site the attention it deserves.

 

Just a quick note, this auction will close on Friday July 29th. Site traffic is slowly picking back up as Myself, Dan and Kim have begun writing more articles again. If the site hit's an average of 10,000 users again before that point I will be removing it at the current pricing.

Thanks,
James - Indyposted.com

 

Auction will be ending early thanks to several private responses and traffic heading back up on the site. Thanks to everyone who participated both on the forum and via private messages.