The prices for internet sites tends to be dropping a little bit compared to the previous year.

Also I guess the resourcing of these sites kind of varies a lot, so we see different quality blogs in some of those niches come through which tend to drop the price down was well

 

- Andrew Knibble, Flippa’s Operations Manager [Source: Problogger Interview]

A couple of months ago I read an article of Daniel Scocco pointing that currently most of the websites are undervalued. He continued that as of current trends website and blog can be bought for just about 24 times the monthly income. But if you invest on offline business you gotta pay about 60 times the monthly income. So obviously this is the right time for buying a blog.

He then predicted that because online and offline investment has to be balanced, in coming years website selling price will increase.

Right now is especially good time to buy websites because, as you saw from the numbers above, the valuations of online assets are still undervalued when compared to offline ones. This won’t last forever, though.

Over time purchasing and owning a website that makes money will become a lot more common, and by then valuations will start increasing…

…so sooner or later online and offline investments will need to be in balance.

- Daniel Scocco, DailyBlogTips.com

But the current trends shows that things are happening opposite to what Daniel has predicted. Sometimes it may take more times for balancing both the online and offline investments. However, here are some of the interesting facts Andrew revealed at Affiliate Summit West, Las Vegas.

Current Flippa Trends

1. Website sale price declines

There are many reasons for declining of selling price of websites on Flippa. Though exact reasons are unknown, it can be due to following reasons.

1. The overwhelming number of autoblogs listed on Flippa.

Though the demand of such blogs are less, Flippa still has a lot of such spam listing. These are one of the reasons for overall average price decline.

2. The frequent Google slaps on 2012

Most of the webmasters and bloggers tend to give up once they got a slap from Google. Because it would be harder to bring back the blogs to the previous conditions once hit by Panda or Penguin, the bloggers and webmasters find selling their babies away as an easier way.

3. Buyers are unsure about the site’s future performances

As Google continuously make algorithm changes, investing on a website could not be a 100% sure win business. It is true that some of the websites performance can be identified by Analytics but a buyer could not be sure about everything that a blogger might have done for increasing rankings of his website earlier. So the future of the website is somewhat unpredictable.

2. Not all niches are equal

According 2012 trends internet marketing niches are sold for low prices comparing to other big performer.

Currently Outperforming niches on Flippa are Finance, Business, Home, Entertainment/Gaming and Family Niche.

3. Adsense is the most reliable source of making money

I always believe in buying high AdSense earning sites. One of the reasons for this is because Flippa provides verify AdSense earning stats so we can be sure that the stats shown are not wrong. As most of the other ad network doesn’t provide a way to verify the earnings, a buyer has to rely on what the seller has been showing despite the fact that it is easier to fake earning screenshots.

4. HUGE demand for BuySellAds approved site

This BSA publisher site made 150 times monthly income!!

There is no surprise for this. It is harder to get approved by BuySellAds because min. criteria for a site getting approved is that it must has at least 50,000 pageviews.

Recently I have spent some money on advertising the services I provide on this blog on one of the BuySellAds publisher blogs. While advertising I targeted for high reputed sites. Like me, most of the advertisers love to spend money on highly reputed niche sites.

So in the eyes of a website buyer if more ads by BuySellAds is published on a site it is definitely a nice signal. The buyer tend to offer more money for that site.

5. Buyers love sites that make money from CJ, LinkShare and ClickBank

The current trend is that buyers love blogs and websites that make more money from Commission Junction, LinkShare and ClickBank. This is due to the fact that the for an affiliate money making website or blog, value of each unique visit is over 8cents/unique.

6. Joomla Rocks! Blogger blogs are also getting sold on Flippa!!

Nonetheless to say WordPress rules. And Joomla sites are performing well. You may know, Joomla has many built in features while WordPress is all about flexibility.

Another fact that opened my eye is, Blogger blog are also getting sold on Flippa! But don’t get confused. These are not free hosting Blogger blogs. According to Blogger.com ToS, the person who created the blogspot blog is not the true owner of the blog. So they can’t sell it away. So the blogs mentioned here are self hosted Blogger blogs.

7. Sale price: Forums ROCKS; review sites are AWESOME

Forums continue to rock on Flippa. This is because forum will have more returning visitors comparing to any other kind of websites. Another fact is, bounce rate will be really low for forums.

Though blogs and review sites make roughly same revenue, review sites get more price comparing to blog while selling. This is due to the fact that comparing to blogs review sites would be more niche specific and it has an intention of making more revenues as more people on internet try to read the review before purchasing a product. Clearly the review site visitors will have more intention to purchase a product.

Over to you

Is this trends useful for you? Are you looking for entering buying and selling business. Share your thoughts!

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