What an appalling and offensive use of one's time.
Make not-so-much money by providing generic content on a subject until X level of popularity is reached, at which point you transition the audience into a not-astounding paycheck and the web property into a commodity valued solely in visits.
And the world moves on, nothing bettered, and very little changed, beyond a tiny shifting of money ownership.
Don't most blogs tend to be read by people in that country though? Perhaps there are subtle cultural differences in topics, language, style that make blogs more appealing to people who are culturally similar... for example, I know that Dell concentrates sales forces by geography to some extent, so that when you call from the South you get another person from the South and might be able to chit-chat about whatever Southerners like to talk about (mint juleps?)
Right, I guess my comment might even be insulting to some - if so, I apologize. I am in Denmark but I think wages here are pretty comparable to the US for many industries.
But, if what you say is true then surely you should consider writing a blog as described in the article?
I always observe how living in the first world changes the perspective of people... (latest example: " travel doesn't take a lot of money." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601857 ).
He's made a point about monetizing it from the beginning, so one can assume that he's earned more than just the $20k: he's trying to show buyers that it earns money, and the best way to do that is to have it earn money.
This sounds like the "How to Get Rich Quick" book that instructs its readers to write and promote a "How to Get Rich Quick" book.
Where exactly is the common ground between writing something you believe in and writing and developing a blog with the explicit goal of an optimal quick cash exit?
A couple things I was curious about after reading this: wouldn't a blog that's just been handed to a new owner end up losing followers once the readership realizes the old author's bailed? Also I'd love to hear any tidbits you'd care to share on monetization strategies for bloggers.
depends. a lot of niche blogs don't make their money on regular readers, but on the adsense revenue on organic searches and people looking around for info they want. a lot of the techniques he talks about is similar to the process people use to make that type of adsense/referral.
People will come for the old content and consume the new content, possibly to a decreasing level, but still. Also if you're simply buying the blog to point some links to another site for garnering Google linkjuice or to own the first SERP or whatever then you probably don't care it's the current link structure (on- and off-site) that's working for you.
> Also if you're simply buying the blog to point some links to another site for garnering Google linkjuice
That sounds like paying for a link to me. Does it count as paid links to them? I always wondered about this kind of thing - I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it, and I don't know anyone who would, so I've never understood what the buyer gets in this situation.
Google, et al., may look like a clan of prescient mystics, but they're not. If you don't change the whois info they don't know the domain changed hands - indeed paid for links are really hard to spot algorithmically if done right. The regularity of updates will affect rank (increasingly it seems) but this can be maintained and content can be purchased at very low rates. Unless your site gets flagged for review by a human I think you're unlikely to be caught.
>I would never keep visiting an authored website if something like this happened to it
My blog, for example, gets most hits for a couple of posts on the Safari browser. Despite being entirely unrelated I can drive traffic to other sites from this blog, not high value traffic for sure, but if I were looking to bolster my pageviews for some reason (1st round?) or give another site an injection of PageRank short term then it works well enough.
Make not-so-much money by providing generic content on a subject until X level of popularity is reached, at which point you transition the audience into a not-astounding paycheck and the web property into a commodity valued solely in visits.
And the world moves on, nothing bettered, and very little changed, beyond a tiny shifting of money ownership.