WebAcquisition’s DealFeed tool found 367 online businesses for sale with 32 new listings over the last 7 days, and 157 aged listings sitting on the market for too long. 173 deals had recent valuation changes. 129 deals had recent changes in multiple.
🚀 Broker Listings
$14.8K/mo Automotive Site (listed 5 days ago) – $458,742 valuation at a 33X multiple. This 1.7 year-old site earns via display ads, Amazon Associates, and affiliate links. 600 articles published. Revenue has been growing rapidly and reached $28K in November. View on Empire Flippers
$5.4K/mo Food and Diet Site (listed 5 days ago) – $237,247 valuation at a 45X multiple. This 3 year-old site primarily earns through display ads (86%). Includes email list with 4,700 subscribers. About 500 published articles (~90% written by owner). Traffic and revenue are steadily increasing. View on Empire Flippers
$2K/mo Gardening Site (stagnant for 6 weeks) – $69,984 valuation at a 33X multiple. Earning 85% of revenue from Mediavine and 15% from affiliate. 125 articles published on an aged domain. View on Investors Club
$1.5K/mo Food Site (reduced by $4,067) – New valuation at $44,143 at a 29X multiple. Earns via Mediavine display ads only so there is an opportunity to add Amazon affiliate links to increase revenue. 92 articles published (written by owner). May fall under the threshold to be accepted into Mediavine (53K sessions in November). View on Motion Invest
$900/mo Tech Site (reduced by $9,250) – New valuation at $15,000 at a 16X multiple. Earns via AdThrive display ads only so there is an opportunity to add Amazon affiliate links to increase revenue. Site was hit by an Google update but appears to have stabilized at about 900 pageviews per day. 188 articles published. View on Motion Invest
🤞 Auction & Off-Market
$3.4K/mo Cooking and Recipe Site: 6-year old high-traffic (100K pageviews/mo) site earning via Mediavine. Site has over 2K referring domains, an email list with 1K subscribers, and a Pinterest following of 17K. Owner says she wrote all the recipes herself. Asking price of $105,000 at a 31X multiple. View on Flippa
$1.3K/mo Las Vegas Travel Site: 3.5 year-old site earning primarily with Ezoic Premium (95%) and affiliate (5%). There is an opportunity to sell leads to local businesses (e.g., nightclubs). Site has 1.2K referring domains and around 40K pageviews/month. All 271 articles were written by the owner. Reserve price at $32,000. View on Flippa
$3.2K/mo Food and Recipe Site: 2-year-old site earning $3,222 per month L6M average via Mediavine only. About 140 articles published. Traffic looks like it dropped in early December. Asking price is $65,000 at a low 20X multiple. View on Facebook
📰 M&A News
Google Launches Update That Uses AI To Detect Paid Links and Link Selling
Google launched an update on December 14th that is the “first real implementation” of SpamBrain to “detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links”.
The Arena Group Acquires Men’s Journal
The Arena Group, a publicly traded digital publishing company, is acquiring Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, Surfer, Powder, Bike, SKATEboarding, Snowboarder, and NewSchoolers from a360media for $28.5 million. The Arena Group is the 33rd largest publisher in the U.S. with over 100 million monthly users.
Domain Magnate Raising New Round for Group Buys
Domain Magnate is raising capital to purchase established content sites in the high 6-figure to low 7-figure price range. The minimum investment is $50K-$100K to purchase a percentage of the LLC that will own the sites. The goal is to sell the sites in 2-3 years for a profit. “GroupBuy4” is expected to launch in Q4 of 2022 or Q1 of 2023.
Budgets are Sexy Sold For 6-Figures
The well-known Budgets are Sexy personal finance blog was recently sold for low-mid 6-figures by The Motley Fool. The site was purchased by J. Money, the original owner who had previously sold it to The Motley Fool in 2019. Organic traffic has decreased significantly since the 2019 sale.
📈 Analysis: Should You Buy Sites That Sell Guest Posts?
Some site listings include guest posts as part of their reported revenue. I think this revenue source should be discounted significantly compared to other revenue sources due to multiple issues.
The biggest issue is that there is a cost to continue generating revenue for guest posts. There is the time required to coordinate with guest post buyers and review content submissions. You will also need to spend time selling the service.
Additionally, the current level of revenue from guest posts could decline significantly if you do not maintain the existing relationships.
Lastly, Google just released a spam update on December 14th that uses AI to detect sites that sell links. Google may become more aggressive in punishing sites that sell guest posts and this could lead to a decline in organic traffic for such sites.
In our due diligence process, we suggest removing guest post revenues completely from the valuation calculations.
👉 Additional Resources
Here are relevant resources to check up on:
- Filter through 300+ online businesses for sale
- Hire us to perform due diligence (Content Sites, Amazon FBA, eCommerce)
- Learn how to buy, grow, and sell sites via The Website Flip
