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I've been building a site for 2 years now, and am about to launch it, but the problem is I have lost all interest in doing anything with it.

It is a social networking/review site in a very small niche, but with great potential.

I am considering shopping the website to various companies in the space which could benefit from having a site like this in their control, and selling them on the multiple revenue streams and businesses that could diverge from this site. BTW these are huge corporations and purchasing my site is a drop in the bucket, and I'm well connected with the industry players, so contacting them, etc is not an issue. But before I do so, I wanted to get some feedback from people on here...

Is there any value in this? Has anyone done something like this before? Although I began this project with intentions that I would see it through, now that I've built it I don't really care, so it feels sort of like I built a spec home and now want to sell it. Ideas anyone?

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2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

There are three things that make a site valuable:

  1. Traffic and search rank. If you have a lot of traffic and a high ranking for popular search terms, it makes your site worth money.

  2. Development Value. The value from a development perspective is based on the time it would take someone else to develop an equivalent site, and the maintainability and platform used in the development of your site.

  3. Income. If your site is making money, it is obviously worth something.

There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who cannot.

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up vote 6 down vote

You may as well just list it and find out. Flippa.com and WebsiteBroker.com are both established marketplaces for selling / buying websites. You can set a reserve price, similar to an eBay auction, to ensure you're not obligated to sell it for $20 just because you listed it.

Selling without any content or traffic will be tough. The more market research you can provide that shows why you were first interested in the opportunity (and why the opportunity's still there), the more likely you'll be able to attract a buyer.

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The problem with just listing it is that you are unlikely to attract targeted buyers who are the ones who will pay top dollars for it. To see if they are interested you would really need to talk to them in person. – Susan Jones Nov 16 '11 at 3:44
Fair point Susan, but there's no reason D_C96 wouldn't be better off doing both. Any asset listed in a marketplace benefits from promotion. Particularly if D_C can attract any bids before contacting his targeted 'industry players', it puts him in a stronger position to say, "You'd benefit from purchasing this site much more than if a would-be competitor bought it, would you like to place a bid?" instead of just "Would you like to buy this site I've developed?" – Jay Neely Nov 16 '11 at 15:59
Good point! :-) – Susan Jones Nov 16 '11 at 22:58

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