Last year I sold my Netbook Reviews website in a deal worth over $100,000 and I discussed how to sell a high end website in my post sale blog post. In that post I mentioned why I used a website broker to extract more value from the sale of my website property. The main reason why I prefer to use a website broker for higher income generating websites is because they have access to a higher level clientele than the typical Flippa buyer (aka people and companies with a lot more money than you and I). They don’t want to sift through piles of garbage listings to find the gold nuggets, so that’s why they use a broker to act as a filter. The broker’s then typically charge buyers 10% of the sale price.

2014 Update: Since first publishing this article back in 2011 Flippa’s gotten a lot better for higher end website sales. Hope my complaining helped. See this comment from Flippa here:

Why Flippa Is Not The Best Place For Selling $100,000+ Websites: Example


In my blog post from last year I said that I knew that my website sold for more than it would have on Flippa.com and today I want to show you exactly why I know this to be true courtesy this majestic website currently listed on Flippa – How To Get Rid Of Stuff. Yes I just said majestic to describe this website, because of the sheer simplicity and genius of this website. HowToGetRidOfStuff.com is a simple content website with an article for every type of “how to get rid of” complaint you can think of like (how to get rid of acne, how to get rid of carpet stains etc.) combined together all of the articles help contribute to the 1.7 Million page views per month and over $20,000 per month profit that this website generates (genius right?).

Why This Website Should Not Be Sold On Flippa:

Check out the comments on the website listing and you’ll see the people that are asking questions have spent only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars buying websites on Flippa (only one commenter had spent $51k at the time of posting). Do you think that these “buyers” could even afford to buy a website that’s making more than $20k per month when most of them haven’t even spent half of what this website earns every month?

The seller is wasting his time answering questions from people that could never afford to buy his website. In fact, they’re probably just trying to figure out how they can make a similar website by asking as much information from the seller as possible about how it makes money (After doing an SEMRush search it’s obvious that it just makes money by ranking for various “how to get rid of style articles”.

This is precisely why I chose to not list Netbook Reviews on Flippa.com

How Flippa Could Combat These Problems:

I don’t want to be seen as hating on Flippa without offering my advice on how to fix the problems, so if you’re listening Flippa (first don’t get pissed at me, I still love you) but here is my advice:

Solution 1. Hire your own team of website brokers to handle these higher end clients with $100,000+ plus websites (or at least set the bar at $500,000+ websites).
Solution 2. If you don’t want to hire your own team of brokers, than just flip these listings to existing brokers to sell them on your behalf for a cut of the commission. Admit you can’t service the high end of the market at this time or more eloquently tell buyers that you can help them extract more for their listings via one of the partner brokers.
Solution 3. Here’s another solution – allow the people that list their websites to keep the listings available to only Flippa buyers who’ve spent $X of money on Flippa. This final solution probably won’t really work well because there probably aren’t enough buyers who would meet the criteria to see these premium listings (not enough yet at least).

I still really appreciate what Flippa is doing for the market because the more people that get into buying and selling websites the better valuations I can get on my own websites. Eventually the higher end investors will make their way into the market in much larger numbers and they’ll bring along some more money to invest as well.

I still recommend Flippa as a great place to sell websites under the $100k mark I just think things could be better for the higher end sales.

Want To Learn More About Buying And Selling Websites?

If you’re on my newsletter stay tuned for some cool news for those of you that want to learn more about how to really buy and sell websites. As I’ve said before, I will be opening an in depth coaching program on how to buy and sell websites. I partnered with a team of website brokers who’ve sold millions of dollars worth of websites to help create the content and to help with the live coaching webinars we plan to do for members. We’re opening that up this month and it will be much more hands on and step by step focused than anything else I’ve done so we will have an open / close date.

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PS. Let me know what else you’d like to hear about my public website purchase case study. I’ve already covered how I bought the website, my plans to increase the income and then how I more than tripled the income. I still have more work to put into improving that website but what else would you like to know?