Welcome to Website Investing Weekly, bringing you up-to-date with what’s been going on in the world of website investing. If you’re not already on the list to receive these updates, sign up below. You can also leave comments at the end of the post.
⚔️ Domainers vs Website-ers
Website investors can outbid domain investors in auctions for domain names that have SEO value. This is because we develop the domains into revenue generating sites, rather than slap a landing page up with a make offer button on it. A good example of this are people bidding on cambridgeanalytica.org over at dropcatch.com which is currently at $3,550, even though Estibot gives it a fair market value of $0.
The Facebook data scandal enabled it to get over 2K referring domains, such as a DE93 from nytimes.com and a DR91 from time.com, making it an authoritative domain. As such you could, potentially, pick this up and turn it into, say, a VPN review site and start ranking and earning quickly.
If instead, you don’t like to get out-bid in auctions, you can head to ODYS who have great SEO domains that they have personally bought and sell at buy now prices. I’m building out sites on two domains I’ve got from them.
⚔️ Display Vs Affiliate
Ron Stefanski (who I interviewed back on Episode 5) wrote a great piece for the Ezoic blog on Why Display Ads Are the Best Business Model. I was tracking RPM (revenue per 1,000 pageviews) on websites listed at marketplaces such as Empire Flippers before the Amazon commission cut, where the typical range was $60-$200. We can expect that to now be $30-$100, so it’s certainly at a level where it’s possible to achieve a similar RPM with display ads.
But what’s most important to focus on is the actual revenue per user. You can jack up RPM by placing more ad units on your page, but that may destroy the UX and get the user to bounce and not visit more pages. Ezoic explains this in their new video:
Also in display ad news, Mediavine announced that they now have a new minimum requirement of 50K sessions a month (up from the previous 25K session requirement), and that:
We are ending our unofficial policy of accepting second sites, including from current publishers, if those sites are below the minimum traffic requirements.
Website investors also need to be aware that when buying a site monetized on Mediavine you now need to re-apply.
For info, Ezoic have a 10K visits per month requirement.
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🤼🏻 Investors Club 2.0
There were a lot of changes in the latest release to Investors Club (by Alpha Investors) which won the #1 product of the day on Product Hunt last week. Here are the cliff notes for investors:
VIP subscription changed back to $127/m
Due diligence reports now priced at $27
Assisted purchase is now included by default (legal docs, site transfer, no-fee escrow, inspection)
You can check out the updated buy page here.
⚔️ Portfolio Vs MarketPlace
Motion Invest announced that more sites are becoming available through their new marketplace:
More great sites pass our due diligence then we can buy and as a result we end up not offering you what you want… great quality sites for sale. We now offer listings of sites that pass our due diligence but we don’t buy.
Direct purchases get a guaranteed sale and come with 0% fees; marketplace purchases come with a 15% success fee but no guarantee of a sale.
😈 I Blame Richard Too
I’ve done several interviews recently where I can’t seem to shut up about newsletters. No matter what questions I’m asked, it always ends up there. I subscribe to a lot personally and there is a new site newsletterstack.com which helps you discover curated ones on any topic. And I’m very happy I persuaded Emilia Gardner to start one on Substack, who did a great write-up of her thought process in Trying New Things and I Blame Richard.
🔢 Website Investing Directory
Hektor over at Hekkup as created a new directory which maps out the service providers within the website investing industry, such as broker, marketplace, operator, etc. It’s much more professional than my Website Investing Toolbox (I have to find the time to get off Thrive at some point!).
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🤖 Intelligent Platform for Publishers
Ezoic is an AI-driven platform built for publishers to optimize ad revenue and maximize site speed. As a Google Certified Publishing Partner, they have access to Google Ad Exchange, as well as top-performing ad networks.
Their real machine learning optimizes ads and layouts for each individual visitor, resulting in much higher revenue, whilst improving UX. You can drag-and-drop ad testing locations using the Ezoic Chrome extension, and their AI ad inventory drives up bids.
Ezoic also offers access to Big Data Analytics where you can break down revenue at a page level to learn how valuable different blog categories (and even authors) are, and effectively measure the ROI from SEO. You can start a free trial of Ezoic today.
🎟️ Own Your Future
Flippa is hosting a virtual event on July 9th called Own Your Future Live 2020. It starts at 10am PT and is for people looking to start a side hustle and generate full-time income from digital assets. It has an all-star line up of speakers including Noah Kagan, James Altucher and my favorite podcaster Sam Marks from Invest Like A Boss.
😎 Publication Sponsorship
Interested in sponsoring this publication? Every update gets emailed to over 2,300 people and averages over 1,500 views, with click-through rates as high as 8% on links. The web version of the posts get shared and I put ad spend behind them on Facebook. Visit my sponsorship page for newsletter and podcast advertising opportunities.
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Re: if you buy a site that is currently on Mediavine you have to re-apply
If your Mediavine account is in the name of ABC, Inc. or XYZ, LLC, there would be no requirement to reapply post-sale, correct?