| In the UK we have a saying, where there's muck there's money! It's an interesting article - I wrote a more indepth version of the same thing three weeks earlier http://www.flipfilter.com/blog/2012/02/22/lessons-in-fast-gr... Flippa has good and bad, but I doubt it would be any other way anywhere else. It goes back to the idea of what's value for one person isn't necessarily value for another. We run the A-List Newsletter which reviews sales of web businesses both from Flippa and from private brokers (http://www.flipfilter.com/a-list) with a value generally above $10K. Each month I look at the top five sellers for that month (in terms of sale price) and the most active (in terms of bids). The top five can vary wildly; in February it seemed they were all Clickbank Sites that sold products in the MMO niche and followed the same formula of launch to a pre-established list, marketing the hell out of upsells and downsells, selling the business then using the initial list (now much larger post launch) to do it again. The most active however are pretty much always sites that sell Internet Marketing Services - for example, a site which sells Facebook likes or one which offers Social Bookmarking services. Their final selling price is always around the $1 - $2K mark and they often end with in excess of 50 bids despite only being a few months old and having no real barrier to entry (ironically, the same sellers will often sell the same templated site again under a different banner a few weeks later). IMO, the sad part is the people who buy these sites tend to be new to the industry and no real information to tell them that this isn't a the easiest way to get a return on their investment. There's going to be good and bad at every price range, and likewise types of sites which tend to do well (Adsense with earnings history, Clickbank affiliate sites, Email Newsletters, anything with a big list in the MMO industry) and things that don't (Web Apps with complex backends, Ecommerce with physical products, News sites which require 'real' journalism) but that doesn't mean the sites which don't sell well aren't worth something to the right buyer. This isn't defending the truly bad stuff or the sometimes fraudulent sellers that you occasionally see on there - it's going to happen for reasons that probably boil down to resources, but if even 10% of Flippa listings based on the 1,000s it has are 'good' then it still has more to offer than a site with 80% good but only 15 listings. |