Skip to auction details.

This auction is worthy of study. Firstly, the site has genuine appeal for the following reasons:

• the site generates $750 / month. This is a tidy sum.
• the site requires no maintenance. This is a big plus for lazy SEOs like wealthy affiliates like rich jerks like me.
• the content is well written and unique. Being a content snob, this makes it a much more attractive site.
• it's in a high paying niche (although this fact is already considered in the previously stated revenue).
• It's an aged web site. Any behaviour the site exhibits, for example rankings and traffic, is more likely to remain constant as it has demonstrated a history of doing so.
• It's a static site. No pesky custom coded database driven site here. However, this is a double edged sword as any additional pages will need to be hand coded and links to them added manually to the rest of the site. Damn that double edged sword!

Establishing Trust

Trust between seller and buyer is important in any sale, but the higher the value of the transaction, the more important trust is. The auction holder has a significant presence in the Sitepoint forums and draws the viewers attention to it, and also some of the sites he's sold in the past. This serves a dual purpose. Not only is he (lets call him Fruit) demonstrating a history of honest dealing, he's also quite clearly telling us the ballpark he wishes to play in. The two sites Fruit mentions sold for $33,100 and $40,000. Disclosing these facts, he signals the fact that the site certainly isn't going to sell for $500.

Any confusion over reserves should be cleared by the statement

My sites tend to go for between $20K and $60K.

I love clear speaking.

He invites you to investigate him, nay, challenges you to find something suspicious about his character!

First, I'd like to establish my credentials. Phone verification etc is all great but you can always do a bit of research on the seller and that's important. Please do some on me.

Thorough Coverage

The coverage of the site is thorough indeed, but not overwhelming. A clear overview of the site's purpose and history is given, and Fruit even mentions the presence of some (unrelated) sites and forum members that share the site's name. As well as saving time and effort by answering questions before they arise, doing so promotes Fruit's reputation for openness and honesty. As does his invitation for any interested party to come down to his place to check his stats.

Current Inbound Links - A Touchy Subject

When you buy a website, the statistics you analyse are a mere snapshot in time. The traffic may remain constant - if certain factors don't change. One of those factors is inbound links to the site. Those links can send traffic themselves and/or they can enhance the site's placement in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Removal of any of those links is a fear that every potential buyer has. This fear is allayed when Fruit reveals

The buyer of the site is free to delete any ads or links on the site and replace them with any others. However, links to this site from other properties owned by me or Best Price Computers Ltd will continue to stay in place for a minimum of 12 months from handover (unless you do something drastic like converting this to an adult site).

Credible Reason For Sale

So many sellers give bogus reasons for selling that it's not surprising that buyers become a little wary (and weary) of them. Examples of such "reasons" are given below:

Bogus Reason	Real Meaning
I'm not a marketer, I just make websites with massive potential.	I've just created a pile of ka ka that can't be monetised and I want to sell it to a mug.
I don't have time to maintain it	The amount of work I would need to put in to this site to make pennies is not worth the effort. And I want to sell it to a mug.
I've got too many other projects on the go at the moment.	i.e. I don't have time to maintain it (see above). Mugs, please apply.
I'll be honest with you, I just need the money.	And this money, I will never get from this site as it's a steaming white elephant. For this reason I'm looking for a mug.

In pleasantly stark contrast, Fruit is bluntly honest in explaining one of his reasons for selling:

If I continue to just leave it unloved and ignored the existing traffic will eventually disappear and the site will die. Unlike some of the other sites I've sold I wouldn't advise you to buy this site just to sit on it. Your interests would be best served by replacing the Best Price ads that aren't paying any more and by adding regular fresh content.

This is a good move. In making this "admission" he provides a legitimate reason for selling so the buyer doesn't have to trouble themselves with looking for impending doom. It's a genuine drawback. Fruit's honesty is the reason the trustometer is redlining at this point!

Customer Service

I think that this says it all:

All figures are accurate but I appreciate that not everyone trusts screenshots 100%. I'm willing for any bidder or potential bidder to view the Adsense and traffic stats on my own PC for as long as they like. I live about 40 minutes from London. Simply send me a PM stating you'd like to do this and we can arrange a time. I'm available on most days. If you live in a nearby European country and get a cheap flight (some cost $10) I'm happy to meet you at Stansted airport, take you to my place for lunch/dinner, show you the stats and drop you back at Stansted.

Given that the site sold for $22,000, picking up the buyer from the airport and cooking them dinner is a relatively small cost. Yet it's touches like these that are invariably missing from most transactions. And it's touches like these that are more likely to get you the sale at the price you want.

---

Auction Details

Sitepoint Listing

* * * Content site established 2003. Earned $40,000 with Adsense * * *

Unique and quality content, high paying niche, long earning history, top Google rankings

• URL: http://www.poweroid-video-editing.co.uk/
• Established: Fri Aug 01 2003
• Uniques/Month: 30,000
• Page views/month: 40,000
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 750
• Google Pagerank: 4
• Listed: Fri Jan 09 2009

Description:

Welcome to my sale thread!

ABOUT ME

First, I'd like to establish my credentials. Phone verification etc is all great but you can always do a bit of research on the seller and that's important. Please do some on me.

I own a large portfolio of high quality sites. I very rarely sell one but when I do there is usually strong interest. Examples: I sold this one (http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/7578) for $33,100 I sold this one (http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/11788) for $40,000 And I've sold several in here and in places like Businessesforsale.com and Digital Point.

My sites tend to go for between $20K and $60K. There has never been a buyer who was unhappy with his purchase. Further, every single one of them will give me a glowing recommendation as an honest person and someone they'd do business with again.

ABOUT THIS SITE

The site is a static content site (no database) and all content on here is unique. The domain was registered in 2003 and new content kept getting added till about 2005-2006 when the site was basically left to its own devices. No new content, no promotion in recent years.

I own this site in my personal capacity but it was originally setup as a "satellite" site for a company selling video editing computers under the trade name Poweroid (bestpricecomputers) of which I was a director. Best Price Computers paid me a lot of money for the very targeted traffic I sent to it. The space that they didn't want I filled with Adsense.

About two years ago, Best Price Computers Ltd ceased selling computers, ceased using the Poweroid name and closed their PC operations. But since they paid in advance to the end of 2008, I couldn't sell this site. That contract is now over though I've haven't gotten around to removing their ads from the site (Except for Adsense ALL the ads on the site point to Best Price Computers' site/s)

The URL of this site includes the word "Poweroid" which some could argue is a trademark of Best Price Computers Ltd but the buyer will have 100% official clearance to continue using it in the site name here - I'm still a director of the company and can give you that official permission. Various others seem to like the name too - there's a last.fm group called Poweroid and people using that name as their forum nick in various places. None of them is connected to this site. Nor is the site poweroid.net which someone seems to have setup as a music site.

This site used to have multiple PR6 pages way back in the day. It has PR4 now but you'll find that it's not just the homepage with PR4 - lots of internal pages have PR4 as well.

Hosting is paid up to December 2009 and domain reg is paid to August 2009. It's a .co.uk domain i.e. United Kingdom but there is no restriction on people anywhere else in the world owning a .co.uk.

REVENUES

The main purpose of this site wasn't to get revenue from Adsense - it was to send traffic to the computer manufacturer. All the flash ads using up the prime space on the site till now (example page: http://www.poweroid-video-editing.co.uk/video_capture_cards.asp) channel traffic to this manufacturer's sites. The rest of the space I monetised with Adsense.

Best Price Computers paid me a very high fee for that space to cover up to December 2008. I can't disclose the exact figure for confidentiality reasons. And it's irrelevant as that offer is not open any more.

However, I've included here an estimated figure of what you could get for that space either by selling it directly or deleting all those ads and better using the space for Adsense. My estimate of the value of that space is a conservative $350 pm or $16,800 for four years (far less than what I actually got). In the early days of the site and before the Best Price Computers ads were placed on there Adsense was doing $80-$120 per day on this site reaching $200 on some days. Since Best Price Computers took all that ad space Adsense has been doing $24 a day on average.

Adsense Earnings

2008 = $7499.71
2007 = $4444.48
2006 = $5710.29
2005 = $11,718.96
2004 (3 months) = $9,106.06

That's an average of $9054 per year over the last four and a quarter years purely from Adsense. I've had a URL channel in Adsense since Jan 2005. In addition to this I've had normal channels on there since Oct 2004. I've got 11 channels on there now.

If you add $350 pm for all the ad space used by Best Price Computers the annual average earnings over the last 4.25 years is $13,306 ($56,550 in total).

In reality, I earned a good six figure sum from this site.

The buyer (and anyone who comes down to my place to check stats) can see channel by channel Adsense breakdown. The buyer will get different breakdowns in CSV form so he can better analyse and optimise high paying areas. After payment into escrow I'll be happy to work with him to download all the specific CSV as per his requirements (or he can come and use my PC to login to my Adsense account and choose them himself)

Images on here:

Adsense 2005-2008.jpg = Jan 19th 2005 to Dec 31st 2008 Adsense stats
Adsense Screenshot 1 = Oct 2004 - Jan 18th 2005 (the period before I setup URL channel)
Adsense Screenshot 2 = Jan 19th 2005 to Dec 31st 2008

TRAFFIC AND REFERERS

Find them here.

Image (average traffic.jpg) showing traffic over the last 12 months - month by month take from Adsense stats
Stats.doc is a copy and paste from my hosting company's stats package.
Referers.jpg is a screenshot of my referrers for all of 2008
Geography.jpg shows where that the bulk of my visitors for 2008 came from.

Average Adsense Page views per day Jan - Dec 2008

944 (Jan 2008)
893
954
805
617
722
753
761
795
893
929
897 (Dec 2008)
+
1085 (first 7 days of Jan 2009)

TECHNOLOGY
The pages have a .asp extension as the original plan was to use some asp technology but that was never implemented so no asp knowledge is necessary to run/edit any pages - they are all just simple html pages (despite the extension name). Any standard $5 per month shared hosting service should be fine. Just check that they can display pages with .asp extensions. The site was original created in Frontpage but can be edited in any other editing package. You would need FP extensions if you're planning on moving it to a different hosting service.  The only FP specific feature it uses is "Include Pages" otherwise called SSIs. If you replace Includes with SSIs you wouldn't need FP on your PC or FP extensions on the hosting. I don't have time to do it on individual pages of the site but I can show you how to do it if you don't know.

Adsense code across the site is very easily changed to your publisher ID because of the Include Pages.

The current hosting (databasepower.net) provides a dedicated IP at a small extra charge which is something I believe I've had since the start.

I'll transfer it to a new hosting company if you want or you can stay with this one. This is so simple a site that there's not really much of a learning curve but I'm happy to help with the transfer. I'm no expert but as you'll see if you research me I've done this one or two times before

CONDITIONS / GUARANTEES

The buyer of the site is free to delete any ads or links on the site and replace them with any others. However, links to this site from other properties owned by me or Best Price Computers Ltd will continue to stay in place for a minimum of 12 months from handover (unless you do something drastic like converting this to an adult site).

WHY SELLING

1. It's original purpose is now not valid since Best Price Computers Ltd stopped selling video editing PCs.

2. I have no interest in video or video editing so can't/won't update the site. Video has taken off in a big way over the last few years and someone who's interested in the subject can make much better use of the site and make a lot more money out of it than I can. If I continue to just leave it unloved and ignored the existing traffic will eventually disappear and the site will die. Unlike some of the other sites I've sold I wouldn't advise you to buy this site just to sit on it. Your interests would be best served by replacing the Best Price ads that aren't paying any more and by adding regular fresh content.

3. For the moment it's still doing great in search engines. For a site that's been "dead" for several years it's still in the first page of Google for terms like "video editing software" and even "video editing". In Google.co.uk it even holds #1 spot for many terms like that. And the referrer image I've linked to below shows just how popular it is with Google and how much of traffic Google sends. Such popularity is not guaranteed forever, of course, but if you take care of this site there's no reason why the ranking should go down. Add some new content and some TLC and I would expect to see more traffic from Google rather than less. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that.

4. The Best Price Computers ads on there are not going to be renewed so if you want to make more money out of the site you'll have to find new advertisers or rearrange and increase the Adsense ads to get more earnings out of Google. Tip: You may want to contact other companies specialising in PCs/equipment for the video editing and video production markets

PROOF / SCREENSHOTS / DUE DILIGENCE

I've included some screenshots and files here: poweroid-video-editing.co.uk/sale/ . All figures are accurate but I appreciate that not everyone trusts screenshots 100%. I'm willing for any bidder or potential bidder to view the Adsense and traffic stats on my own PC for as long as they like. I live about 40 minutes from London. Simply send me a PM stating you'd like to do this and we can arrange a time. I'm available on most days. If you live in a nearby European country and get a cheap flight (some cost $10) I'm happy to meet you at Stansted airport, take you to my place for lunch/dinner, show you the stats and drop you back at Stansted.

PRICE

Reserve is not disclosed. I don't have a BIN in mind but if a sufficiently high offer comes in I'll consider it and add that BIN to this auction listing. Quality content sites with long histories sell for as much as 60 months income. (Example: $6000 per year sold for $30K.  60x based on the six figure sum I made would be a ... six figure sum and I don't have any expectations anywhere close to that! My reserve is a long, long way below $100K and I'm starting bidding at $1

I'm the author of Sitepoint's guide to valuing websites. It would be a conflict of interest for me to use my experience/reputation to try and convince you that this is worth a particular amount. I'll leave it to individual bidders to decide value and may the top bid win.

QUESTIONS AND BIDDING

Have a question? DON'T post it in this thread. Please direct all questions to me by PM only. I'm more likely to see your message quickly if you PM me (as I have email notifications on). I'll be watching my email for your messages which is easier for me than logging into Sitepoint every couple of hours.

Fake bidders use conditional bids as a way of backing out of completing an auction they've won so I'm not taking conditional bids. Whatever your condition let me try to meet it before you bid.

If you have no previous site purchases or sales in Sitepoint I suggest you contact me before bidding so I can confirm you're a genuine bidder.

COMPLETING THE TRANSACTION

I'll accept the other forms of payment listed here if you trust me enough to send me 100% of the funds before I transfer this property over to you (I say this only because I know some previous buyers would do that with me). In all other cases it will have to be escrow. I'll split escrow fees 50-50.

Revenue Details:

As in the main description

Traffic Details:

As in main description.