7 Websites That Did Really Well on Flippa (and What We Can Learn From It)
Since starting to work for myself, I’ve watched carefully other people ideas. I’ve watched even more carefully which ideas worked, and which websites got sold. A great place for observing this is Flippa.
Flippa is an online marketplace to buy and sell websites. It turns out it’s a burgeoning industry with established buyers and sellers tracking the right opportunity, along with people who just want to get rid of their websites and get some money to focus on other things.
Websites are like any other form of investment: there are good deals to make, scams to avoid, trendy neighborhoods to know about. You can buy a fledgling website one day, revamp it, market it like mad, and resell it 6 months later with good profit. Actually a few people do exactly this as their fulltime activity. I must say it’s pretty interesting just to watch the action.
That’s what I ‘ve done, for over a year now: keep a list of interesting sales. An interesting sale is one where either:
- the owner created and ranked a website very quickly to make good profit
- the owner sold a website that I could have done myself given my current skills
- the same kind of websites gets sold over and over (meaning it’s a “hot niche”)
- Great example of brand execution
- site URL: http://createhype.com
- sale price: $30.000
- time-to-sale: 8 months
- what we can learn: really great execution of building a massive following & incredible monetization
- background: Justine was actually featured on ViperChill (http://www.viperchill.com/5k-case-study/)
- Auction page
- Website script creation and selling
- site URL: http://articlesetup.com
- sale price: $5.250
- time-to-sale: 13 months
- what we can learn: there’s money to make with custom website scripts, that could be of interest to web developers. In this case it’s a script for making article directories but you can take the same approach with any kind of website: classifieds website, social networking website etc.
- Auction page
- Good ol’ business directory
- site URL: http://list-of-companies.org
- sale price: $200.000
- time-to-sale: 6 years
- what we can learn: business directories are also good niche earners.
- Auction page
- Powerful entertainment magazine
- site URL: http://blippit.com
- sale price: $200.000
- time-to-sale: 2 years
- what we can learn: really impressive growth – also shows you can really build a powerful entertainment site in 2 years
- Auction page
- Quick adsense site
- site URL: http://petfoodtalk.com
- sale price: $60.000
- time-to-sale: 7 months
- what we can learn: this one was really pushed very strong very fast. It has also been built with lots of content- with 430 unique posts, it shows that if you’re committed to write blog posts regularly, you’re gonna get the traffic. It must have hurt though to write about pet food all this time
- Auction page
- Affiliate website
- site URL: http://reversetelephonelookup.org
- sale price: $31.000
- time-to-sale: 14 months
- Auction page
- A filesharing site
- site URL: http://filevelocity.com
- sale price: $50.000
- time-to-sale: 2 months
- what we can learn: that’s probably the most impressive sale of all: $50.000 for a 2-month-old website, that’s what we call a good ROI. It’s also interesting because I happen to own a file sharing website, although its focus is totally different (it’s a paid app for companies). This website managed to get crazy growth by promoting very aggressively an affiliate program and give money to its users to upload files. I’m not sure it’s sustainable practice since big filesharing sites have been recently shut down but the owners of this site have managed to make some bank for sure.
- Auction page
Nice article, Tommy. I own the largest forum for talk on buying and selling websites and Flippa comes up in the discussion sometimes.
Please exercise caution in reading Flippa figures. Not all sites showing as sold on Flippa are actually sold. I haven’t checked all of the above sites but I’d be very surprised if all those “sales” went through to completion.
For example, take blippit.com. Your post shows it sold at $200K. One month later it was “sold” by the same seller for $40K: https://flippa.com/2636052. It would be wrong to conclude that it was worth $200K and achieved a buyer at that price. You can’t even be sure of that latter $40K price.
You’re only showing the winners here, and for that those are really underwhelming amounts. If you pay a skilled webdeveloper his salary, what entrepreneurship premium is left? You should have called this post ‘How to make a buck on Flippa’.
This shows me that its not too hard to sell my site if i ever decide to do that, but my quiestion is, how often do you update your site. I found you about a month ago and it seems that not much has been said, you should update more!
Flippa is OK, but I’ve had more success buying sites on the Warrior Forum.
Most of what’s on Flippa is junk, and you’ve got to watch those shady techniques for bumping up a site’s earnings.
For a few years back then, Flippa is one-stop site for some people to rack money from buy-sell-buy-sell rotation and some of them got pretty cash from it. I’ve been away from them for a while and planning to return but the 1st post are some news to head upon. Thanks