Weekly M&A: 9 Listings, News & Analysis

Weekly M&A: 9 Listings, News & Analysis

Get the inside scoop on the online business M&A industry with businesses for sale, news, and market analysis.

WebAcquisition’s DealFeed tool found 338 online businesses for sale with 37 new listings over the last 7 days, and 147 aged listings sitting on the market for too long. 141 deals had recent valuation changes. 108 deals had recent changes in multiple.

🚀 Broker Listings

We cover businesses for sale that are new, aged, or undervalued.

$3.7K/mo Hobbies and Home Site (listed 5 days ago) – $167,391 valuation at a 47X multiple. 11-year-old site earning primarily through display advertising (83%) and Amazon Associates (17%). About 95% of the content was written by the owner. Traffic is at nearly 100K pageviews per month but 19% of traffic is from 3 pages. Includes an email list with 3K subscribers. View on Empire Flippers

$7.7K/mo Automotive Site (listed 5 days ago) – $274,887 valuation at a 37X multiple. 1-year-old site earning primarily through display advertising (95%). Well over 100K pageviews per month but traffic has been declining since June. Recently published 220 new articles that may increase traffic once they start ranking. View on Empire Flippers

$49K/mo Fast Food Restaurant Site (listed 3 days ago): $1,950,000 valuation at a 44X multiple. 9-year-old site earning via display ads only. Receiving over 2M pageviews per month average over the last 12 months. Ranks for 600K keywords and has 13K referring domains. View on Quiet Light

$700/mo Gardening Site (listed 9 days ago) – $27,259 valuation at a low 33X multiple. 3-year-old site earning primarily via Mediavine (90%). May not meet the requirements for Mediavine currently due to the seasonality of traffic. View on Investors Club

$500/mo Ceramics Site (listed 7 days ago) â€“ $14,496 valuation at a 30X multiple. 3-year-old site earning via Amazon Associates and Adsense. Traffic has declined over the past year. View on Motion Invest

$7.7K/mo City Guide Site (reduced by $38,700) – New valuation at $270,900 at a 35X multiple. 5-year-old site earning via AdThrive and direct advertising. 1300 articles published on an aged domain. Over 300K pageviews in each of the last 4 months. View on Motion Invest


🤞 Auction & Off-Market

We cover listings where more “effort” is needed since there is no prospectus. You need to bid and/or ask questions to obtain data.

$1.7K/mo Celebrity Site: 4-year old high-traffic (220K pageviews in Nov 2022) website covering celebrities and entertainment. Currently monetized with She Media display ads, affiliate, and guest posts. Includes Pinterest account with 112K followers and Instagram account with 16K followers. Asking price is $70K. View on Flippa

$1.3K/mo Video Game Site: 2-year-old site earning via Ezoic. Receives over 100K pageviews per month. 2,700 articles published. Reserve price of $21,560. View on Flippa

$3.2K/mo Outdoor Site: 6-month-old site earning $3.2K per month L3M average via affiliate only. 165 articles published on aged domain. The asking price is $160K. View on Facebook


📰 M&A News

Check out the new happenings in the acquisitions industry.

Global Ad Spending Growth Expected to Slow in 2023

Publishers are seeing lower than expected RPMs in Q4 and the slowdown in ad spending is expected to continue into 2023. The media investment group Magna recently lowered their projection for 2023 global ad spending growth to 4.8% (it was previously 6.3%).

Empire Flippers Promotes Boopos For Purchase Financing

Empire Flippers is promoting revenue-based financing through Boopos which offers up to 80% of the purchase price of an online business without a personal guarantee. Instead of interest, there is a payback amount of 1.15X to 1.6X depending on how long it takes you to pay. Boopos focuses on e-Commerce or SaaS businesses but they will also fund content sites that meet their requirements.

Onfolio Holdings Planning to Acquire More Online Businesses in Q1

Onfolio Holdings, which raised just over $12 million in its IPO, is looking to acquire more online businesses in Q1 of 2023. They have deployed about $4.5 million so far in 2022 on acquisitions including BWPS, Proofread Anywhere, and SEOButler. They reported a gross profit of $135,457 in Q3 according to their latest quarterly report.


📈 Analysis: Should You Buy Starter Sites?

“Starter sites” are small niche sites that earn little to no revenue.

Some website investors like to buy several starter sites, add content, and wait to see which ones grow.

What if you bought a portfolio of 22 starter sites from Motion Invest that were listed in 2021? Would you be happy with the performance?

We looked at 22 Motion Invest listings from 2021 priced below $1,500 and checked their AHREFs traffic after 1 year.

The total cost to buy the 22 starter sites would have been $25,660.

The total starting AHREFs traffic of the 22 sites was 6,426. After one year the total AHREFs traffic increased 6% to 6,819.

8 sites went to 0 traffic (36%) and 3 sites had over 1,000 pageviews (14%) after one year. The highest traffic site had 3,170 (it started at 2,197).

No sites from our sample increased monthly organic traffic by more than 1,000.

Based on this sample of starter sites, it may be a better option to consider websites with higher and more established traffic (compared to multiple starter sites).


👉 Additional Resources

Here are relevant resources to check up on:

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Mushfiq Sarker

Mushfiq is the founder and lead advisor at WebAcquistion M&A firm. He has actively transacted on 218+ website acquisitions since 2008. His expertise is in due diligence of content, Amazon, eCommerce, and SaaS businesses.