Websites I Don’t Want to Buy

I’m a semi-regular reader of some of the websites for sale marketplaces and the vast majority of the listings there are sites I wouldn’t even consider buying. While you might think that’s a bad thing I think it’s actually pretty useful since figuring out the common links between what I don’t want helps me focus in on what it is I do want.

You can’t really go to a “sites for sale” forum looking to buy a specific type of site. Well I guess you can but you’ll be waiting for a long time before it comes along. If you know exactly what you want to buy it’s probably better to look for sites in that area and see if any of them will accept an unsolicited offer. If you’re just browsing around looking for something good to strike your fancy it helps to figure out what you don’t want.

Proxies and Free Image Hosts

You’ll find a lot of proxy sites and free image hosting sites for sale. Most of these sites are essentially turnkey. That is they use a commonly available script and have very little that’s unique about them - typically only a little of the design. These sites also suffer from a major problem - they consume a lot of bandwidth (cost) and are very hard to monetize well (revenue). You might be able to squeak out a small profit from these kinds of sites but the margins will be extremely thin. In the image hosting arena you also need to be on constant guard against copyright images and porn images.

Funny Video Sites

These seem to pop up pretty much daily. Besides that fact that they’re trying to compete with established funny video sites like break.com and user uploaded video sites like YouTube there’s again the problem of being heavy bandwidth users and hard to monetize. There’s also the little issue of copyright and the fact that most of these sites violate copyright on a regular basis. Some will even provide you with scripts that automatically scrape content from other sites. If stealing content is a key part of your business model I suggest coming up with a different business altogether.

GPT Sites

You might not be familiar with the term “GPT” or get-paid-to but you’ve certainly seen the sites advertised around the net. These are sites that offer free iPods or free Xboxs if you sign up, refer some friends and complete some offers. These sites came under attack in recent times because there’s some contention that while you don’t pay for the iPod it’s not really “free” if you have to pay to sign up for offers in order to get it. While some of these sites do offer entirely free ways to get the prize there’s enough legal uncertainty and ill feelings in the press to make me want to avoid this are entirely.

Static Content Sites

They’re so web 1.0. Actually there’s nothing wrong with static content sites. The major issue is that you’ll need to update the content at the site in order to grow (or even maintain) traffic. That means it has to be an area where you can write good content and if it is then why not just start a blog on that area instead? This isn’t a complete non-starter for me but the site would need good, original content in a area where I could add more content and come with good traffic and decent monetization. 99% of these sites that are up for sale don’t meet those criteria.

What’s the Point

If you’re in the market for buying a site you might wonder what’s the point in figuring out what kinds of sites you don’t want to buy. First having a list like this will help you quickly scan over the dozens of new listings for those that you might find interesting. Second if you can identify the qualities of a site that make you want to avoid certain niches you can see if those same qualities are also present in other niches. If you’re in the market for a site consider what you want to avoid and see if that helps you figure out what it is you do want.