Flipping a Young Website? Forums May Get The Best Return.
This morning I sat drinking a cup of coffee and wondering what kind of site gets the highest valuation at an early stage. New websites are hard to buy and sell because they are unproven, so you often have to consider future potential. I decided to check it out by running a screen for all sites that have sold with Pagerank of 0. Now to be honest, some webmaster that rely heavily on Adwords traffic may not spend much time link building, and occasionally you can have an old site with a PR0, but in general, PR0 sites will be those that are relatively young.
I graphed the result and was a bit surprised. Of the PR0 sites that have sold in our database, Forums have the best valuation.
Notice the steep forum slope. Also note that blogs come in last at this level. How do we explain this? My theory is that because forums are self-sustaining, if they have any traction at all, people are willing to pay for the potential that they will become solid revenue generators and require little ongoing work. Blogs on the other hand require constant work and updating to keep the traffic coming. So the lesson here is if you want to build and flip a site quickly, try a forum, or possibly a community (the second most popular) but stay away from flipping new blogs.
If you find this interesting, consider signing up for our service. You can go here to see what we offer. Enter promo code dpoint and you can sign up at half price (ends 8/15/07).