I have a celebrity gossip site that's getting about 20,000 uniques 85000 page views monthly. It's a medium-sized site right now. About 20000 pages indexed in Google. It's a little over a year old and monthly income fluctuates and can get be as much $300. Yes, I know my traffic and revenue isn't impressive but considering the site is not a full-time occupation and I don't spend time advertising it or promoting it I want to think the stats are pretty decent. I was on the verge of selling the site for $3500 the other day but the buyer changed his mind at the last minute, which was fine because I wasn't sure I really wanted to sell the site anyway. And since the sale didn't happen I'm thinking that I want to go for broke with this site, meaning I want it to turn it into a household name like TMZ, Perez and those big guns. The problem is, my site kind of has a bit of an offensive name so I would actually want to move the content to another domain that I own but haven't been doing anything with since September. This will essentially mean starting over because the other site gets at max 30 visits per day. But I do have a plan for what I'm going to do to get the site out there. I'm going to create a show to run in episodes via youtube. I'm already in the planning stages for the show talking with a couple of people involved in media production. The aim is going to be to create a hot commodity in the show, a show that will rack up high subscription numbers via its youtube channel. I've had some pitches from some people already and some of the ideas are pretty good. I live in a college town so getting the show produced will not be a problem. Also, the domain I would be moving the current site's content to is a pretty good domain name. At least I think it is. It's hollywoodlatest.com. And the site that I would be moving can be viewed here What I'm hoping to do, and here's where you guys can tell me if it's a good idea or not, or if this kind of thing can even be done, is try to sell profit share percentages totaling 50% in order to raise the funds I need. Profit share percentage just means that if someone buys a 5% profit share, they will be entitled to 5% of the revenue generated by the website and the youtube show. It wouldn't be like ownership or partnership or anything like that. Of course I would have to work out all the legalities but luckily I have access to 2 lawyers so that won't be an issue. My question is, is this a realistic way to try to raise funds. I would be trying to raise $25,000 to get things off and running, so I would sell at $2500 for a 5% share because I wouldn't want to have too many people on board so as to keep things manageable. Does this sound remotely feasible? Has anyone here ever done it? How did things work out if you've done something similar. I'm not particularly a clueless person with an overactive imagination. I've managed a website for a client that made over $200,000 for the client between income from membership dollars and income from selling the site to a company backed by SE Johnson and Ford; and I've made over $130,000 from my own ventures as a software developer. None of this is big money, I know, but it's still a respectable record for a lone individual working from a corner of a living room. The point is, I do have some proven capability for turning ideas into money so I wouldn't be considering this if I didn't think I had the ability to make it happen. I did run this idea by a few acquaintances who thought I was dreaming, but they're the sort to deflate your balloon no matter what. I thought this might be a better place to get some useful feedback. Hopefully somebody will take the time to respond. I don't seem to have a good track record for getting responses to my posts.
Hey Spencer, thanks for the reply anyway. Kind of hard to really explain something in detail with a few words. Usually when you're not fully clear you're asked to be more clear, more detailed but I see your point.