RARE OFFERING: Makes circa $1,000 pm - established, auto-pilot, quality tech site

Domain: techbooksforfreedotcom
Age : 2.5 years (since August 04)
Pageviews per day: avg 4,600 page views per day over last 365 days
Earnings per year: $11,000 in last 12 months ($10.3K Adsense, $700 links)
Time to maintain: Almost zero (2-3 hours per year)
Page Rank: PR5 home page (was PR6)
Starting bid: $5,000
BIN: No BIN decided
Auction end: Not decided
Disclaimer: This sale is advertised in multiple locations and the sale could be withdrawn if the undisclosed reserve is not reached.
Traffic sources: Google, Yahoo, other SEs, lots of technology sites. NO PPC.
Hosting requirements: Low bandwidth, no fancy requirements, less than $10 per month.

Links reported:
Yahoo: 6908 (excluding self links)
Google: (Google link command has long been "broken")

Potential:
CTR is extremely low for a site of this kind. Some redesign/testing ads in different positions may even double earnings.

What the site is about: The site contains links to technical books available for free download on the 'net. Each link contains a brief description. The site has a page each for books relating to networking, C++, perl/python, java etc. It can't get simpler than that. There is also one free (copyleft) book that is hosted on the site itself /intro_to_data_com/ (written in 1999). The author originally didn't have any place to host it and asked that it be hosted here. You can continue to leave it here, or delete it altogether. It doesn't make much money.

All pages are static. No database. No complications. Suitable even for a newbie webmaster.

Finding content: Once every few months you can go search online for new books and add about 5-10 to the site. That's it. No need to go asking for links, doing link exchanges etc. Other technology webmasters just link to this of their own accord!

The homepage used to be PR6 but after some reorganising of internal links etc., some months ago it has dropped to 5. However, traffic from Google has actually increased since then so I'm convinced that Google still loves it. Earnings per day in Feb this year were $21 ($36 in Feb '06) and it went up to $35 for last month and $31 for this month. It doesn't vary by much more than that but consistently delivers the profits (over $20K since I first put Adsense on in July/Aug 2005).

Most of the earnings are Adsense ($10.3K in the last twelve months). The rest is text ads from a major text link broker (about $700). Some advertising space has been given to an another company free of charge. You can delete those ads and replace with your own when the site is yours. Obviously, there is potential for some more earning there but I wouldn't put it at more than $1-2K p.a.

Proof:

All claims made here are 100% true though buyers have the usual problem of getting "proof". I'd suggest that you can start by checking me out. I've sold a few big sites here for over $100,000. (No, there isn't an extra zero there). Contact the current owners of those sites and they'll tell you I'm a stand-up, 100% trustworthy guy. Further, if any of you are in the south of England you are welcome to come and examine the Adsense stats etc., live on my PC i.e., you can browse through them, view whatever you want to view, and download CSVs. For other serious buyers I am willing to email you requested CSVs on signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement and providing me your snail mail address and phone number.

Traffic stats are a little trickier. I can (and will) provide those figures but I must disclose that there's another site on that same VPS hosting account and the figures will look inflated. It's difficult to separate the stats for that site and this one but you're welcome to try. The Adsense figures are accurate though and I have the channel data pretty well organised - even page by page for this site.

Site gets traffic from Google and does very well in SERPs:

Free technology books (if you drop the word "free" it may still rank well if not in #1)

Free networking books (if you drop the word "free" it may still rank well if not in #1)

Free microsoft books

Free science books

Free engineering books

But it also does well in Yahoo and gets traffic from a lot of other sources. Tech sites love linking to it and as it shows in Yahoo there are thousands of inward links.

Reason for sale: Consolidation of sites, focusing on a few higher earning ones and selling off the others.

There are lots of crap sites that come up for sale, sites with hardly any backlinks, with no Google reputation, and some only a few days old. And they sell for 12x. Further, many of them require you to actually do work. If you're making the same amount of "profit" as you would spending that time flipping burgers then you've been conned. Why pay money to make $x an hour when you can walk into MacDonald's and get that job for free? Don't underestimate the time all those sites take to manage and run.

This site is one of those rare sites with history, steady earnings, and running itself. Payment by escrow.com only. Escrow fees 50-50.

If you're interested I'd be glad to provide as much information as you need and spend as much time as you want answering questions, helping you judge whether this is the right investment for you etc. But I do want to restrict such detailed conversations to only those parties who are seriously interested rather than every kid who passes by here and posts "PM me the stats". If you believe this is an opportunity you want to explore please PM me with your email address (not the question) and I'll send you a non-disclosure agreement. Simply sign it, provide your full postal address and email it back to me and I'll answer any questions by email or phone (your choice).

As I don't come to DP often questions in this thread may get ignored. Have a question? See the previous para.

Sometimes people miss things

As I don't come to DP often questions in this thread may get ignored. Have a question? See the previous para.

 

Emails sent to the enquiries so far.

 

I've posted Adsense screen shots at this link

Those who have done the NDA also have a copy of the Adsense CSV right from the start - a long history of steady traffic and earnings.
All PMs have now been replied to.

 

Highest bid so far is $14,700.

 

Just 24 hours left. Bidding currently $20,000. Latest earnings and access to traffic stats etc provided via in the link in my earlier post.