In the previous post on this topic, I have outlined a few general categories of sites that a person can buy online:
- Honest and successful sites
- Leftovers of successful sites AKA spent shells
- Other people’s failures
- Low-end clones
- Expensive clones and high-end fraud
I also spoke in that post about the first two categories: truly successful sites and success leftovers.
Today, I will continue to elaborate on the remaining few categories. Specifically, we are going to talk about other people’s failure that the owners are trying to push.
Other people’s failures
One of the more prevalent types of sites for sale, especially on Flippa and DigitalPoint, is sites that didn’t quite live up to the owners’ expectations. The reasons for the failure could really be numerous and different, a lot depends on the niche, the site type, the business model. Sometimes, the idea was bad to begin with. Sometimes, the owner didn’t do a good job promoting the site or supplying it with content. Often, they wanted to copy someone else’s success, but either failed to do it or it was too late and so on.
The bottom line is, the site did not become a gold mine for the owner for whatever reason and they are tired of maintaining it and want to get something for the effort they put into the site.
Just because the loser needs money is not necessarily a good reason to give it to them. Most of the time, the value of a site like this is really questionable, too. Sure, something — in terms of content or promotion — must have been done about the site and it may even make a buck or two here and there. So, yes, typically the site has some value, which likely is more than that of a brand new site, but if you ask me, the difference isn’t that big.
Most of the time, if you want to run a similar site, it makes no sense to buy a failure and try to develop it. First, if you are buying something, you would be much better off buying success and not a failure. Second, if the site had failed, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole idea — think market saturation or an a priori bad idea. So, why spend time and effort trying to pull something from the ditch? And pay to do it, too? Come up with a better idea, start a new site and use the money you save on producing good content and a successful site.
Keep in mind, too, that when someone is trying to sell shit like this, they are going to go out of their way in order to pretty up their ugly offspring: most of the time, there would be a lot of talk about the potential of the site in the sales page and how the site is great, but they are too busy with other projects, they need to move, they have a lot of other successful sites and just don’t like this one and so on and so forth.
Expect to see a lot of bullshit that can’t be verified on the sales page. They need to put some lipstick on their pig and make sure it sells well — because they spent some time, effort, and, possibly, even money creating the site, the few dollars difference that a good sale and a not so good sale can make is, actually, very important.
Sometimes, an owner of a site like this, especially if the site does make some money, will attempt to artificially increase the seeming value by engaging into questionable practices, such as traffic buying, fraudulent advertising clicks and so on. Something like this would put the site into the high-end fraud category, though, which I am going to get to shortly.
The takeaway from this post is: don’t spend money and time on other people’s failures. Instead come up with a good idea, do your research, try something similar for yourself if you must, but concentrate on creation, not resurrection. After all, since you are a newbie, what makes you think you are going to do a better job running a site that has already failed to a certain extent than the original owner?
