What would you be willing to sell your bread and butter site for?
 

Here's a hypothetical question to all on this board, it's the only board I ever really cared about, the folks here are my kind of people and basically I'm a hermit.

Let's say you have a website (adult or mainstream, doesn't really matter - except, well I guess it does.) Let's say you have a mainstream website which is currently providing you the bulk of your income. Without it, you'd have to be flipping burgers or something in order to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.

What price would you be willing to sell that site for, if, for example it averages $10,000 USD a month over a 12 month period.

Some vague details:

1) Due to reasons I won't go into detail, the site has been online for over 10 years, is trusted by Google and is generating more customers/making more and more money each month with very little input. In fact, truthfully, I have a lot of issues and barely even look at the site.

2) Most buyers want to make their investment back as quickly as possible (obviously). When this kind of website is a commission for life kind of deal, not a monthly recurring revenue thing that most of us are familiar with, makes each and every client that much more valuable IMO.

Therefore, the majority of the income is coming from clients that are already affiliated with the website. This may or may not be part of the sale, of course, the price would be much higher if the customer base was included.

How much would you be willing to sell such a website for? X month revenue? How much would a buyer be willing to budge, knowing that with minimal effort, $10k a month could be increased to a much, much higher amount.

This is all hypothetical of course, but I am very interested in any responses.

Most of us are in the same boat, and I'm guessing we'd all just be... guessing. You need some opinions of people who actually buy websites of that magnitude, and if it makes $120k/year be prepared to prove everything.

Don't think I could get enough for my adult stuff to make it worthwhile to sell.

I'm doing a lot of mainstream design work these days so I'm still sitting in front of a monitor and keyboard. The only difference is my monitor is often full of cooked dead animals instead of live naked humans. Being a vegetarian personally I find the naked humans less gross, but not by much.

Ballpark figure would be around last 12 months of site generated income + your additional work aka introduction month or two after a sale with the new owner. But I wouldn't sell it if it makes that kind of money with so little effort. I would rinse and repeat few more sites of this kind and/or build a little more network around it. But that just me.
If it works and brings you steady quite good income why sell it. That is probably one of many questions from a possible buyer. Like HW said be prepared to show all details year or two back at least.

If it is a solid business model there are people/companies out there that will pay 2 years revenue, maybe more.

For example, years ago (and today even) it was thought that 18 months income for a pay site (member site with monthly rebilling members) was a good sell. But really that is a bit of a low ball. First off those rebilling members are gold because you know they are willing to use their credit card so if you have other products you can sell them there too increasing revenue instantly! Secondly you count the past member email database you acquire, it's huge and again more customers that at one point were willing to use their credit card. Then you have traffic base, can you sell more as the new owner than the old owner and so on...

So from the sounds of your site I would no way in hell sell for 1 year's income!

I have a residual income and can tell you even with minimal effort you will make 5 fold a year's income if it is stable to begin with. Mine has!

I'm not really pushing to sell the site, the problem is I am getting countless emails from people wanting to purchase it. Probably because I'm doing such a terrible job of maintaining it.

Thanks for the responses so far, they're in line with what my thinking is. One interesting discussion I've had recently was the fact that since my site is small, commissions are based on a sliding scale with the larger affiliates getting 40% of revenue, smaller affiliates, such as myself only receive 25%.

If I went into partnership with a larger website/company/person/group, we could split the 40%, I'd be getting access to more content/reach/whatever and only getting slightly less of a percentage with potentially a lot more actual revenue.

The only reason I've considered selling is because life's hard, and I don't know if I want to sit in front of a computer forever.

I would personally not sell it for less than 2 years of revenue. But I somehow doubt that someone would pay that.

I've heard everything from 6 months to 24 months gross income as far as the sale price is concerned. Ramster's post covers everything I'd be able to tell you :)

Other than that, I like pc's idea of "rinse & repeat" |thumb

As for my site(s), I doubt I'd get what I'd need to live off of if I sold them now, but in 6 months, based on what happens with my back, I might be able to sell it for less & still make out.

I agree, making more websites following the same successful strategies that I used for this site is probably the best way forward, except I believe a lot of its value stems from the fact that it is one of my early domain registrations, while I did have some other related domains, I've let them expire due to not having the time to develop them and the fact that every cent counts these days.

Thanks for the responses, as I've told most buyers, unless an offer I can't refuse comes along - or something drastic happens in my life - I'll just keep at it, trying to find the motivation to improve it and possible create some more websites with the hope of them becoming profitable as well.

You're not gonna know for sure until you build a new one.

I used to think the same, until I built 3 new linklists over a 6 month span. One was on a domain registered in the late 90's, the other two registered a month or so before I opened them. The 2 new domains did much better as far as SE's are concerned, even though 1 of the 2 new ones has the exact same design as the old domain.

So, you never know for sure until you try |shake|

That's very interesting GG, thanks for your input.

I admit that I no longer keep up with the latest search engine forums or blogs, I found that I was spending so much time reading about potential new algorithm changes and whatnot that I ended up having barely any time to actually work on my sites.

Plus, even if you know everything there is to know about Google and all the new changes etc. The whole game can all change in an instant anyway.

You've provided me with a glimmer of hope, now all I need to do is act. Unfortunately that's been my biggest hurdle for as long as I can remember, lack of motivation and procrastination.

|$bag| I have a landlord who sometimes gets violent if you are late with the rent. That is all the motivation I need! |hammer

You're very welcome |thumb

As far as studying up on the latest SEO & whatnot, I'll admit that I've RARELY read that stuff. I just know the basics, and, as odd as this may sound, the basics do still work as far as coding your pages.

Now, how to get nice useful relative proper keyworded correct inbound links to your site/page, on that, I have minimal knowledge & am still confused as to why some things work & some don't |lol|