I thought I would mention it because I’ve mentioned it before (in regards to targeting). Plus it fits in with my latest post.
The one thing that burns super-bright in my head - liquidity. Having cash on hand is just plain useful. You could have a deal with massive company X and giant company Y, but without the liquidity to make it happen, what is the use?
The other thing that I think a lot about is opportunity cost. If I have a site that makes me $100 a month - and I sell it for $3000 - which is the better deal? Having a steady (yet extremely unspectacular) source of money, or having the cash today (which could, over those 30 months, make you a lot more).
The past month was the best month for this site. It did 1399 pageviews, it generated $205.41 dollars (yep a CPM of $146.82), and I sold it for a nice 31x monthly at $6500.
Both of us are happy. The buyer is building up a collection of content-websites (he has bought about two-dozen from us already). I’m pushing that money back into our other larger projects (which should generate a lot more money within those 31 months).
The site has been steady from day one - Google sends it a nice chunk of traffic. But there is no way to guarantee that traffic won’t go down (or in last month’s case - go up). So it still is a calculated risk on behalf of my buyer - and I decided I would rather have the liquidity today and ‘invest’ in it than waiting for its slow return.
So something to think about - you may have sites generating revenue, but you might be better off selling them and creating something else. The other lesson of course is don’t get hung up on traffic too much - $200 dollars from <1500 pageviews is nothing to sneeze at.
2 Responses to: And I sold a site …
Joe Davison (newbie)
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:52 pm
1
I’ve done things like this a number of times. I agree that the cash now is better than “investing” in the site for the long term. Of course it always depends on what you plan on doing with the cash.
By the way, getting a 31x multiple of the highest month’s revenue on a site like this is very nice.
Want to introduce me to your buyer?
Ahmed (l337)
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm
2
Indeedio.
To be fair - the site ranked #1 for a very niche but *very* profitable keyword, and it had stayed there for a while.
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