I had thought that the blog train was starting to slow. The money-men were (are) starting to get in, and (thankfully) the importance of pageviews is waning while the importance of revenue is on the up.

Or so I thought.

Recently we began some house cleaning of Bloggy Network. We have built up a collection of some nice blog resources and it was time to let go. The best one of the bunch was Blog Catalog. A common sight alongside the menu bar of many blogs, it has over 1 million backlinks (as reported by Yahoo). Yet even with all those backlinks, its revenue was still meager - roughly $1700 a month.

So after some discussions between Jacob and I, we set a BIN of $40,000. At almost 24 months revenue, it sounded like a good deal for us. So Jacob went out and posted it on SitePoint. We were going to see how it went, and then start contacting private buyers to get somewhere near the BIN price.

The site sold in under 24 hours.

Within the first five hours we had two offers of ‘if you lower BIN to $30k I will buy it immediately.’ Within 12 hours of the BIN reached, Jacob told me that seven other people had contacted him if the deal fell through, and two even offered us more to break the deal (some people have no ethics).

Our other two sites also flew away. The first one was Eatonweb, which hit the BIN in roughly 72 hours. The sale price was 100x revenue. Eatonweb was the first blog directory, so we were a bit sad to see it go.

The other one was 2RSS. This one went BIN in roughly 3 hours, also at 100x monthly revenue.

So what happened? A few things to learn:

  1. Blogs are as hot as ever. The speed at which the BINs were reached speak volumes for that. Incidentally the person who lamented not getting BlogCatalog also lamented not getting BlogRankings when it was for sale.
  2. People can see quality. BlogCatalog was a top-notch quality site, and Eatonweb and 2RSS were two well established sites that need a bit of an overhaul. There is a lot of junk, and when you post something of high quality, it will get snapped up. I’ve sold about half a dozen sites, and all of them went for minimum 20 months revenue.
  3. Set your BIN high! I do want to say that we have no regrets about the amount we did raise. But going back to my previous point - quality commands a premium. A good solid premium. When will the next PR7 blog directory with 1 million backlinks come again?
  4. No place for emotions if you want to succeed. I sort of wanted to keep Eatonweb (after all, it was the first blog directory), but it simply didn’t make sense. When other people’s livelyhood depends on your decisions, getting emotional is not good.

This was a good move for us. Blog Flux is our main focus anyway, and it made sense to give these three sites new owners to take them to new levels.

[UPDATE: Doh! I keep clicking on ‘Save’ instead of ‘Publish’ in WP. Well - it is live now]