i has bough 3 sites, one site been scammed by the seller, one site problem with coding after 1 year owned and another one is problem with server and all the site not very profitable for me. Therefore, before end of this year i need to overcome it.
haven't bought any sites, couple domains have interested me for personal projects - but too rich for my blood. focused on developing streams of income via niche marketing now.
A little biased here and I will tell you why. I have made my own sites for some time but they were always more functional as opposed to pretty. I program so that's how they turned out. I wanted to take a run at buying a site and cranking up my SEO skills so I went to ebay. Mistake. I have bought about 12 sites from ebay. I found a great guy that helped me out a lot in SEO plus his sites were very clean and very indexable (all text except three photos on homepage). About 20 articles each site (supposedly unique). One of these sites was from someone else and had a very nice eye pleasing homepage. They used frontpage which makes me puke as they are not very good for indexing - Google webmaster tools told me my best keyword were "font" and "Georgia" - gotta love frontpage for repeating that 500 times rather than a stylesheet. Anyway, the real story is that most of the sites I bought off ebay were scraped for content. The eye pleasing one, was scraped for all graphics, content, and duplicated about 30 different times and resold. I have tried to contact those folks but oh well, at least I got out there first, but it really sucks. One of the others were duplicated so poorly, his homepage still bookmarks to my domain... Anyway, since then I have taken the backend code from the guy I bought 11 sites from and have since out 15 more sites with my own rewritten PLR content. They are getting indexed great and no one has scraped them yet. Of course any site can get scraped, but ebay just seems to attract this sort of stuff. I am not selling any because I think most sites pull $500 and the money, if nutured with patience, should eventually bring in more than that by keeping it..or at least I hope because I dont want to find another business to be in
I like developing my own sites though I hear many are just buying developing and reselling them. Not a bad idea if it comes with constant flow of traffic for the targeted niche. I do buy more domains then i ever need though. just fell in love with the names an the future prospect of selling them for a larger profit.
I have bought around 15 websites. All of which (cept 2 which I am working on) I have sold for around double what I paid for.