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Ask HN: alternatives to Flippa?

26 points by thibaut_barrere ↗ HN
I'm considering buying and/or selling web sites in the next few months.

I already know of flippa.com for that, but would like to know if you tried alternatives that would be less known or more interesting.

38 comments

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tocomment
Can you tell us more about your plans? I've always wanted to buy a site for a passive income source but I'm always worried I'll get scammed.

Btw if you have a business that makes money from adsense can you deduct buying a new site as a business expense?

thibaut_barrere
I'm more on the buying side for the moment. The thing is our consultancy (we're 2) is quite beneficial this year and I expect (but might be wrong) we will earn less next year.

So I'm looking for sites I could maintain, promote and develop.

I understand your worries about getting scammed: I think it's a whole new job, with very specific points to check etc :)

I just asked my accountant to see if the buy could be deducted (at least here in France). I assume it will be doable.

tocomment
Anyone know if it's deductible in the US?

Can you shed any light on the type of sites you're looking at? How do you evaluate them?

prs
The forums at digitalpoint are also known to have some decent volume - Not necessarily high-end sites but sufficient for some small-scale website flipping. If you know what you are looking for, contacting website owners directly is a method I recommend as an alternative to online marketplaces.

Browsing through flippa and the likes is like searching for a needle in a haystack for me and only once in a while a few golden needles emerge.

thibaut_barrere
Thanks - this makes a lot of sense and match my impression when browsing flippa, as well :)
photon_off
I made a website whose sole purpose is to show you similar and alternative sites. This should act as a nice starting off point.

http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/flippa.com/

Top results are: WebsiteBroker, SitePoint MarketPlace, AfterNIC, and DealASite.

petervandijck
Tested it with some sites, that works pretty well!
photon_off
Thank you :)

I put a lot of work into it, but am not getting the traffic I imagined.

petervandijck
Time to stop developing (the autosuggest feature is a bit too much I think) and start promoting. Try asking for ideas here :)

One idea would be to have some kind of widget I can put on my site. I'd also recommend simplifying the UI, it's a bit overwhelming now. Think Google results page.

photon_off
What would the widget on your site do? Suggest other website that are similar to yours? Seems kind of counter productive if your goal is to retain visitors.

I've toyed with the idea of making a similarity service for publishers, or perhaps a wordpress plug-in. Moreofit would receive a set of URLs, and you could query it with a URL and receive the most similar amongst the set. I imagine this would be very useful for large sites such as SmashingMagazine, where finding similar articles on keyword alone will fail, and the site is so big that manually digging up related articles would be a pain. Instead, just drop in an iframe or script and moreofit will show a list of n most similar articles from your domain (or set of links).

smallegan
I like functionality of the site...the design? not so much...I'd put a bit more work into the aesthetics of the site.
grg
I agree with the other comments. A simplified UI and some promotion, and the traffic should go up.

So it's a great idea for the site. On the other hand, what's different about this site vs, say, clicking on "Similar" in a Google search results page?

I'm just curious...if there's certain functionality that's better on moreofit.com, I'd personally be more likely to use your site in the future, rather than just using Google.

photon_off
Google similar sites generally bring up mundane and often not-so-good results. It answers the question: "What sites have some keywords in common with this one?"

Moreofit uses user-generated tags (and their 'weights') to determine matches. The data comes from Delicious and encompasses hundreds of millions of instances of users manually categorizing sites. The data is thus fairly semantic and very accurate. Moreofit answers the question: "which sites have been tagged in a pattern most like this?" which turns out to a much better descriptor of similarity.

Thanks for your feedback.. perhaps you could help me out and give me some ideas of how to promote this?

grg
Sorry it took me so long to respond; I just noticed your reply to my comment.

I like the idea of pulling data from Delicious to determine matches. It gives you a good source of social data, and it solves the "chicken and egg" problem that a site like yours would have if it weren't pulling data from somewhere like Delicious.

In the future (once you get your userbase up), you might consider pulling data from other sources, too (Hacker News, Reddit, Digg). I'm not sure how that process would work, exactly, but it's food for thought.

As far as promotion, here's a good article that I just saw this week on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540

As a general rule of thumb, find people that are already writing articles (blogs or otherwise) on subject matter similar to your site. Use Google News and Technorati.com to find these articles (maybe terms like "social news" would be a good place to start for your purposes).

Then, start talking to those authors (in the comments section of their posts, via email/twitter). Once you have a rapport with them, offer to do a guest post on their site, sending a pre-written article that won't take them much time to edit. If your article provides value to their reader base, then it's good for you and them.

If it were my site, I'd personally focus on promotion first, and then a streamlined UI later. One quick idea on getting a good design is 99designs.com. It's a great concept on crowdsourcing design. I promise I'm not affiliated with 99Designs in any way--I've just had good luck with using them in the past (I've had a couple of logos designed through their site, and was pleased with the value of the design combined with a low cost).

zampo4
For marketing your site, I think you could make a Firefox extension that gives in-browser suggestions for similar sites. That would be so useful. In fact, I believe a browser addon would be the "most convenient form" of this idea.

I played around with Firefox extensions three years ago and submitted a very niche addon for fun. Within the first week it received 10,000 downloads and ultimately downloads went up to 100,000. That was only possible because Mozilla would feature newest addons on the front page with no lobbying efforts required on the developer's side. Three years ago, there were a couple of links near the middle of the Mozilla page to the newest addons. Now, there is a link to sort by "recently added" near the top of the page, so visitors are one click away from seeing the most recent. Also, there is a sort by "recently updated" option. I remember people frequently updating and seeing their extensions remain in the "most recent" section.

For finding similar sites, I personally use xmarks and similarsites.com. (Fo)xmarks obviously has a firefox extension. Similarsites.com has an extension with around a million downloads; don't know if the chicken came before the egg, though.

You could bundle some functionality into your addon like quantcast/alexa/pagerank data push it as an SEO tool.

An ironic usage of your website just occurred to me: 1. Use google to find a couple of marketing/seo blogs/websites. 2. Input these websites into moreofit.com to find more marketing/seo sites. 3. Email list of found sites about moreofit.com and how useful it is for marketers. Describe how you found them using moreofit.com.

photon_off
Sending the link about to marketing/seo sites is a good idea. I suppose it would do them good to encourage people to see what their competition is up to; and even better that you can sort by popularity to give you some insight as to how your more-popular counterparts got where they are.

As per the bookmarklet... that's coming shortly. My next project is going to blow up the bookmarklet space.

willwagner
Xmarks also has a similar site feature based on our bookmark data:

http://www.xmarks.com/site/flippa.com

It also categorizes sites so you can look up the top rated sites for an individual topic:

http://www.xmarks.com/topic/web_sites_for_sale

CorrectTheory
I think http://www.similarsitesearch.com/ is the best search engine for finding similar websites. It's hard to distinguish the differences in search engines for finding similar sites for popular websites like flippa.com. I saw all of them returning the similar results except that similarsitesearch.com gives more results than others. similarsitesearch.com generates the best result for smaller websites like moreofit.com.

BTW I think moreofit.com has very good UI. Better than any other similar ones I have seen.

photon_off
I am very impressed with Xmarks. I'm not sure why I never found out about it until now. Your similarity results are definitely "good enough" in the high saturated categories. The "topics" aspect is pretty awesome.

Might I ask: How did you populate the categories? Do you back reference domains with a directory?

spokey
Neat. Can you explain where each site's tags are coming from?
petervandijck
Here's what I don't really understand: if a website is actually, for real, bringing in decent passive income, WHY would you ever sell it? Result: only failed passive-income websites are for sale. So why not start from scratch then, especially with the risk involved (site may be banned by Google etc)
ojbyrne
a. there's no such thing as "passive income" - there's always some effort.

b. even if there was such a thing as passive income, it has to produce a better ROI than alternative investments.

petervandijck
a. There is such a thing as passive income, sites where the only effort you put in (for years) is counting the money.
ojbyrne
I've yet to see an example.

EDIT (adding an appropriate - though ancient - quote and reference):

"Internet commerce appeals deceptives (sic) to a particularly male fantasy. Guys like the idea that after a short initial period of programming, a computer will tirelessly slave away for them, making them money 24 hours a day. Set up the site, walk away, and watch the money pile up in your bank account.

You can feed this fantasy by reading articles in the business press about http://amazon.com, the perennial poster children for Internet commerce. They set up what is essentially a front-end to a wholesale book distributor's database, and now they are selling books every few seconds. It sounds like they are rolling in money.

Well, it turns out that I know some people who work at amazon.com. The customers don't always fill out the forms exactly right. The books aren't always in stock like they should be. The customers send e-mail asking when their books are going to be shipped. So instead of one Unix box and a big vault for the cash, the company has 200 employees sucking all the money out of it. And remember, this is the best that anyone has really done: high expenses and high sales. More typical is an Internet store with high expenses and low or no sales."

http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/53002.htm

nikhilgk
The only example I have seen is plentyoffish.com. According to this: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol... the guy who owns this works barely an hour a day and earns more than 4M$ in revenue of it.
ojbyrne
Having seen first hand the pathetic joke that is Inc's journalistic ability (and integrity), I doubt every word in that article.

They're just slightly above 419 scammers.

nikhilgk
This was the link I was looking for when I posted that, a slightly more "authoritative" source. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13digi.html
ojbyrne
I wasn't really fair to Inc, having heard all the plentyoffish hype, I just don't buy it. And its still not actually passive.

I've been involved with a friend's site that pretty well fits the category. After some initial programming, SEO, etc, it did very well for 2+ years (> $100k revenue), but user support grew and grew, and then clones popped up, and started ranking ahead of him in Google results, then the revenue dropped to next to nothing. He could invest more time to get back to the revenue level he was at, but I just think that's the natural cycle for "passive" web sites.

Things go wrong, competition appears, users never quite fit the mold you want them to fit in, bad things happen externally...

tocomment
I think that's a really great question. How do you build a site that makes money from scratch?
aresant
Surprisingly ebay's businesses for sale > websites for sale can be a decent place to search
smallegan
It seems like it may be easier to find sites in the market that you'd be interested in buying and then contact the owner(s). Has anyone ever had any success in doing this?
marczphillips
Hello,

So you know, we have just started listing sites for sale at http://marketplace.searchforecast.com/

We typically have been dealing with sites that turnover more than $50,000 a month and most of these sales are done offline. We own and operate the CRS Conference (http://www.crsconferences.com) sponsored by Google, AOL, eBay which over 1000 publishers attend as well as many website buyers and sellers. Many of the transaction/negotiations happen at/around the Conference. In fact, our next conference is in Los Angeles in January 2011!

We also large interactive Nasdaq listed companies + other large networks actively buying domains. These large networks buy 20-30 websites a month. We know these firms personally and hence offer our clients premium access to these very reputable buyers.

Unlike many website listing websites, SearchForecast is a business which operates a large technical staff optimizing some of the largest websites in the world (BBC, Harrahs Casino, Deloitte). We also have over 20,000 visitors per month to our AdSense Directory at http://www.searchforecast.com/adsense_directory_index.php from all over the world which is why we are now listing websites for sale online.

We would certainly like to speak with you about your requirements and prefer that we post your site as a free listing on the Marketplace. We will waive the $29 listing fee by using the promo code 2740835 (we have the fee to keep away spammers!) Follow this link to http://marketplace.searchforecast.com/selling-business.php

We do take a commission upon completion of the transaction, which is 10% but we offer a unique "Sellers Guarantee" - you only pay us when you have been paid by the buyer. This gives our clients peace of mind. For larger clients that have over $1M, we have lower success fees.

We would be happy to match the sellers commission you have in place with other agents.

I would be happy to answer any questions and look forward to hearing from you,

Best Regards, ________________________________ Marc Phillips CEO, SearchForecast Telephone: 650.530.0895 Cell: 415.606.0900 Email: marc.phillips@searchforecast.com Website: http://www.searchforecast.com Skype: marczphillips Twitter:@SearchForecast ________________________________

tocomment
Thank you for your message. I am currently out of the office, with limited access to e-mail.

I will be returning on 9/28/2010.

If you need assistance before then, you may reach me at 301-912-9001.

Jon Bezos

CorrectTheory
I think http://www.similarsitesearch.com/ is the best search engine for finding similar websites. It's hard to distinguish the differences in search engines for finding similar sites for popular websites like flippa.com. I saw all of them returning the similar results except that similarsitesearch.com gives more results than others. http://www.similarsitesearch.com/ generates the best result for smaller websites like moreofit.com.

BTW I think moreofit.com has very good UI. Better than any other similar ones I have seen.