8 ms·

It's at http://thecupcakeblog.com/ http://thecupcakeblog.com/ , if you're curious. Personally I don't think the site is worth that, given the demonstrated reve

by patio11 13y ago

It's at http://thecupcakeblog.com/ http://thecupcakeblog.com/ , if you're curious. Personally I don't think the site is worth that, given the demonstrated revenues and what the market is typically like for sites with this model [1], but then again the fair price for most things is where a buyer and seller agree it is. Here's the auction page on Flippa: https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-rev-199k-visits-475k-pageviews-a-month-large-social-following https://flippa.com/2736282-over-1000-ad-rev-199k-visits-475k... [1] You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue. Nothing about it is defensible at all. Incidentally, if you were bound and determined to be the source for cupcakes online rather than a content scraper in the middle, you'd end up producing a site like: http://www.christmas-cookies.com/ http://www.christmas-cookies.com/ My SEO buddies and I ballparked owning that site as being roughly as lucrative as a full-time job as a cookbook author/editor (though it may have suffered a bit since we spitballed those numbers, due to ranking changes and the like -- it no longer dominates results like I remember it doing in ~2008).

stevesearer 13y ago
Interesting analysis. My website, http://officesnapshots.com http://officesnapshots.com, is essentially the same idea ("information DJ") but in a much different vertical - company offices. Once you start collecting information in blog format, the difficult thing to do is to do anything interesting with it other than have it in date-based archives. The Christmas Cookies site is much more interesting in that way. For anyone looking to start a blog with this sort of model, I've found it important to actually go and sell your site to advertisers as opposed to sitting back and waiting for them to come to you and buy.
- edwinnathaniel 13y ago
  Hi Steve! I'm a casual Office Snapshots viewer! :D It's always exciting to come to your site once in a while just to see those nice offices (especially those outside North America). Thanks for keeping the site up to date too!!
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    Awesome, always happy to meet readers! I've tried to be pretty diligent about categorizing offices by location, so if you're interested in a plain ol' list: http://officesnapshots.com/location/ http://officesnapshots.com/location/
- pwelch 13y ago
  Another casual Office Snapshots visitor. Also, wanted to say thanks for keeping it updated. Always an interesting read.
- benlarcey 13y ago
  Looks like you're selling banners on the right hand side and not nofollowing them, be careful as that's a Google crime and you may find yourself on the receiving end of a Google penalty.
  - stevesearer 13y ago
    I've gotten the impression (pun!) that nofollow isn't strictly necessary for banners. In this video[1], Matt Cutts says many banners have nofollow to prevent bots from messing with tracking numbers, but I didn't get the feeling he is saying it is not allowed. Anyone else have wisdom on this? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs
    - Matt_Cutts 13y ago
      Hi Steve, that advice was for banners that used typical ad networks, and Google handles the vast majority of typical ad network banners correctly. It looks like your links are direct hyperlinks, so I would recommend using nofollow on the right-hand links or ads.
      - stevesearer 13y ago
        Well it doesn't get any clearer than that so I'll be updating accordingly. Thanks for the advice on it.
abailin 13y ago
Would the 12k Facebook likes and 31k Twitter followers play into the price at all?
- silverbax88 13y ago
  Twitter followers are just about worthless from a business perspective unless it's a staggering number (in my experience). You get a LOT more direct response from a Linked In group of 4,000 active members than a Twitter account with 100,000 followers.
  - poopsintub 13y ago
    The more followers you have the worse your click-through rate becomes. Twitter is horrendous for trying to get people to actually go to your content or advertised tweets because no one is constantly signed into twitter unless you're doing it for business or you're a teen.
  - jonnathanson 13y ago
    A lot of that has to do with the way Twitter works. Following someone on Twitter is as simple as clicking "Follow" and forgetting about it. No social considerations to weigh, no social qualification (Do I actually know this person? Does he know me?), and no site qualification (Am I a real person? A bot? A highly connected person? A low-connected person?). Joining a LinkedIn group asks a lot more of a user. There are multiple stages of pre-qualification, both user-initiated (seeking out and joining the group) and group-initiated (a lot of groups screen new members, for instance, screening "Stanford Alumni" for a Stanford email address of some sort). Your typical LinkedIn group membership is a lot smaller than a Twitter followership, but it's more homogeneously centered around a specific dimension of mutual interest, and the leads are more higly qualified. Twitter can work, and quite well, but it's a painstaking process. Cultivating a qualified and influential Twitter following is tantamount to having a second full-time job. There are followerships of 100,000+ that have basically been hand-picked and nurtured. Those are the kind of followerships that actually work. If you have even 10,000 fans that hang onto your every word, and a decent portion of which have others who do the same for them, then your following is worth an order of magnitude more than a 100,000+ following of mostly bots and dead weight. Getting to 1M+ followers on Twitter, based purely on buying or attracting bots or mutual follow/follow arrangements, is a nontrivial challenge and a serious waate of time and money. Not many people do it. This is why the sort of people who have 1M+ followers usually have a decent chunk of qualified followers, as well. These people tend to be famous outside of Twitter. I would be floored by any small business that managed to get into the hundreds of thousands of followers, let alone millions, with a strong percentage of qualified, active followers. It's pretty easy to suss out the difference, too.
poopsintub 13y ago
That's decent revenue. I'm not sure if it's sustainable for a site that basically has no unique content other than generic descriptions. When you have a site making 'real' revenue on flippa at 1k a month, it usually will go for at least 3x the yearly earnings, if not more. She found a niche and should have kept going with it, outsourced or even took a year off without doing anything. The revenue would have likely still been there. Who knows if it would have lasted 3 years and ended up making her the $30k+ though.
beachstartup 13y ago
> Personally I don't think the site is worth that i don't agree. the url and existing content is worth at least that much to a larger publisher that specializes in food blogs. it's less than the cost of one junior FT employee for a year. i know this because the sale actually happened, so by definition, you are incorrect in that it was overpriced. someone bought the business, it is therefore "worth that". not sure what you are trying to say here, you might as well say the sky is green and gravity pulls upward. profitable, large companies have a very different interpretation of value than broke individuals. furthermore, they are oftentimes purchasing assets through debt or equity, which is quite different than something like money saved from free cash flow.
- mcguire 13y ago
  I would tend to disagree: it is difficult to know whether an investment is actually overpriced until after the buyer has filed for bankruptcy due to being unable to support its acquisitions. As the poster's original housing business demonstrates.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    i would disagree with your disagreement. the price of the transaction is the value, period. what happens afterwards is neither here nor there and can be complicated by factors that are completely unrelated to the viability of the original business, purchase price, or anything else. what happens if the purchaser makes the purchase, and then are the victim of a class-action lawsuit brought against a sister brand in which they have to spend their entire savings and must declare bankruptcy, thereby bankrupting thecupcakeblog?
    - avalaunch 13y ago
      So you're basically asserting that by definition nobody can ever overpay for anything?
- nialo 13y ago
  The "value" may well be the sale price by definition, but that's not really the important thing here. The important question is, was buying this particular site for this particular price a good decision, one that will tend to make money for the purchaser. I don't know what the answer is, but opinions can certainly vary.
rfnslyr 13y ago
Wow, there is money in this? Why am I wasting time working on legitimate and difficult products? I'm a fantastic frontend web developer, and this seems like something slapped together very easily. Definitely want to try my hand in this. I don't know anything about SEO and marketing though. Where could one learn?
- stevesearer 13y ago
  The difficult thing isn't really putting a site like this together, but rather keeping up with it for a (sometimes long) while when it is making no money.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    Sounds like a lot of tech startups.
    - wangarific 13y ago
      Sounds like any business really.
- eurokc98 13y ago
  Google's SEO Starter Guide is a good place to start: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... Another is their SEO Report Card from a different angle: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-s... Moz (SEOmoz) provides another good source of info here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Awesome thanks!
- munger 13y ago
Sodaware 13y ago
What would be the best way to get the initial traffic for a blog like that? It's always been a major stumbling block for me.
- fowkswe 13y ago
  Keep at it. She made 10 posts a day, religiously. These things have a way of snowballing if you give it love and effort. Shameless plug for my information jockey endeavor: http://heritagebros.com http://heritagebros.com.
  - molsongolden 13y ago
    Seriously how long should it take to grow a beard like that? I think the longest I've gone is a few months so maybe I just need to man up and let it go for a year.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  If it has interesting content, people will find it in Google. Getting traffic isn't about SEO, it's about having good content.
  - ry0ohki 13y ago
    That's not true at all, as Google as no way of surfacing new content. Write the best, most authoritative article on a topic in the world, and if you simply put it out there without doing marketing (getting others to link to it), no one will ever find it on Google. If it's in the SERP it will be on page 9000. This is the biggest mistake I see startups doing, simply creating content and hoping it surfaces to the top of Google.
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      One article won't get any site ranked, but a site with many good articles will build traffic regardless of SEO. Saying otherwise is selling snake oil.
hahla 13y ago
Where are you getting your valuation multiple from? You seem extremely confident in stating "You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue." I've been a successful website broker for many years now, and I have never seen anyone using trailing year's proven revenue in practice. In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history.
- programminggeek 13y ago
  On Flippa, 1 year trailing revenue is about average or maybe current/average month revenue x 12 months. Anyhow, some are more, some are less, but that's about where the market prices seem to be.
- vasco 13y ago
  What would be the first few avenues you should consider?
- lingben 13y ago
  > Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history. So what would you recommend if not flippa?
- gabemart 13y ago
  >In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Could you very briefly explain what kind of changes you're talking about? I have a site I haven't updated in years that gets ~120k page views per month with about $2.30 EPM and I have no idea what to do with it.
unhappyhippie 13y ago
I disabled ABP on the thecupcakeblog but I still don't see any ads.

by patio11 13y ago

stevesearer 13y ago

Interesting analysis. My website, http://officesnapshots.com http://officesnapshots.com, is essentially the same idea ("information DJ") but in a much different vertical - company offices. Once you start collecting information in blog format, the difficult thing to do is to do anything interesting with it other than have it in date-based archives. The Christmas Cookies site is much more interesting in that way. For anyone looking to start a blog with this sort of model, I've found it important to actually go and sell your site to advertisers as opposed to sitting back and waiting for them to come to you and buy.

edwinnathaniel 13y ago
Hi Steve! I'm a casual Office Snapshots viewer! :D It's always exciting to come to your site once in a while just to see those nice offices (especially those outside North America). Thanks for keeping the site up to date too!!
- stevesearer 13y ago
  Awesome, always happy to meet readers! I've tried to be pretty diligent about categorizing offices by location, so if you're interested in a plain ol' list: http://officesnapshots.com/location/ http://officesnapshots.com/location/
pwelch 13y ago
Another casual Office Snapshots visitor. Also, wanted to say thanks for keeping it updated. Always an interesting read.
benlarcey 13y ago
Looks like you're selling banners on the right hand side and not nofollowing them, be careful as that's a Google crime and you may find yourself on the receiving end of a Google penalty.
- stevesearer 13y ago
  I've gotten the impression (pun!) that nofollow isn't strictly necessary for banners. In this video[1], Matt Cutts says many banners have nofollow to prevent bots from messing with tracking numbers, but I didn't get the feeling he is saying it is not allowed. Anyone else have wisdom on this? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SesBNVanGs
  - Matt_Cutts 13y ago
    Hi Steve, that advice was for banners that used typical ad networks, and Google handles the vast majority of typical ad network banners correctly. It looks like your links are direct hyperlinks, so I would recommend using nofollow on the right-hand links or ads.
    - stevesearer 13y ago
      Well it doesn't get any clearer than that so I'll be updating accordingly. Thanks for the advice on it.

abailin 13y ago

Would the 12k Facebook likes and 31k Twitter followers play into the price at all?

silverbax88 13y ago
Twitter followers are just about worthless from a business perspective unless it's a staggering number (in my experience). You get a LOT more direct response from a Linked In group of 4,000 active members than a Twitter account with 100,000 followers.
- poopsintub 13y ago
  The more followers you have the worse your click-through rate becomes. Twitter is horrendous for trying to get people to actually go to your content or advertised tweets because no one is constantly signed into twitter unless you're doing it for business or you're a teen.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  A lot of that has to do with the way Twitter works. Following someone on Twitter is as simple as clicking "Follow" and forgetting about it. No social considerations to weigh, no social qualification (Do I actually know this person? Does he know me?), and no site qualification (Am I a real person? A bot? A highly connected person? A low-connected person?). Joining a LinkedIn group asks a lot more of a user. There are multiple stages of pre-qualification, both user-initiated (seeking out and joining the group) and group-initiated (a lot of groups screen new members, for instance, screening "Stanford Alumni" for a Stanford email address of some sort). Your typical LinkedIn group membership is a lot smaller than a Twitter followership, but it's more homogeneously centered around a specific dimension of mutual interest, and the leads are more higly qualified. Twitter can work, and quite well, but it's a painstaking process. Cultivating a qualified and influential Twitter following is tantamount to having a second full-time job. There are followerships of 100,000+ that have basically been hand-picked and nurtured. Those are the kind of followerships that actually work. If you have even 10,000 fans that hang onto your every word, and a decent portion of which have others who do the same for them, then your following is worth an order of magnitude more than a 100,000+ following of mostly bots and dead weight. Getting to 1M+ followers on Twitter, based purely on buying or attracting bots or mutual follow/follow arrangements, is a nontrivial challenge and a serious waate of time and money. Not many people do it. This is why the sort of people who have 1M+ followers usually have a decent chunk of qualified followers, as well. These people tend to be famous outside of Twitter. I would be floored by any small business that managed to get into the hundreds of thousands of followers, let alone millions, with a strong percentage of qualified, active followers. It's pretty easy to suss out the difference, too.

poopsintub 13y ago

That's decent revenue. I'm not sure if it's sustainable for a site that basically has no unique content other than generic descriptions. When you have a site making 'real' revenue on flippa at 1k a month, it usually will go for at least 3x the yearly earnings, if not more. She found a niche and should have kept going with it, outsourced or even took a year off without doing anything. The revenue would have likely still been there. Who knows if it would have lasted 3 years and ended up making her the $30k+ though.

beachstartup 13y ago

> Personally I don't think the site is worth that i don't agree. the url and existing content is worth at least that much to a larger publisher that specializes in food blogs. it's less than the cost of one junior FT employee for a year. i know this because the sale actually happened, so by definition, you are incorrect in that it was overpriced. someone bought the business, it is therefore "worth that". not sure what you are trying to say here, you might as well say the sky is green and gravity pulls upward. profitable, large companies have a very different interpretation of value than broke individuals. furthermore, they are oftentimes purchasing assets through debt or equity, which is quite different than something like money saved from free cash flow.

mcguire 13y ago
I would tend to disagree: it is difficult to know whether an investment is actually overpriced until after the buyer has filed for bankruptcy due to being unable to support its acquisitions. As the poster's original housing business demonstrates.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  i would disagree with your disagreement. the price of the transaction is the value, period. what happens afterwards is neither here nor there and can be complicated by factors that are completely unrelated to the viability of the original business, purchase price, or anything else. what happens if the purchaser makes the purchase, and then are the victim of a class-action lawsuit brought against a sister brand in which they have to spend their entire savings and must declare bankruptcy, thereby bankrupting thecupcakeblog?
  - avalaunch 13y ago
    So you're basically asserting that by definition nobody can ever overpay for anything?
nialo 13y ago
The "value" may well be the sale price by definition, but that's not really the important thing here. The important question is, was buying this particular site for this particular price a good decision, one that will tend to make money for the purchaser. I don't know what the answer is, but opinions can certainly vary.

rfnslyr 13y ago

Wow, there is money in this? Why am I wasting time working on legitimate and difficult products? I'm a fantastic frontend web developer, and this seems like something slapped together very easily. Definitely want to try my hand in this. I don't know anything about SEO and marketing though. Where could one learn?

stevesearer 13y ago
The difficult thing isn't really putting a site like this together, but rather keeping up with it for a (sometimes long) while when it is making no money.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Sounds like a lot of tech startups.
  - wangarific 13y ago
    Sounds like any business really.
eurokc98 13y ago
Google's SEO Starter Guide is a good place to start: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... Another is their SEO Report Card from a different angle: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-s... Moz (SEOmoz) provides another good source of info here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Awesome thanks!
munger 13y ago

Sodaware 13y ago

What would be the best way to get the initial traffic for a blog like that? It's always been a major stumbling block for me.

fowkswe 13y ago
Keep at it. She made 10 posts a day, religiously. These things have a way of snowballing if you give it love and effort. Shameless plug for my information jockey endeavor: http://heritagebros.com http://heritagebros.com.
- molsongolden 13y ago
  Seriously how long should it take to grow a beard like that? I think the longest I've gone is a few months so maybe I just need to man up and let it go for a year.
gnaritas 13y ago
If it has interesting content, people will find it in Google. Getting traffic isn't about SEO, it's about having good content.
- ry0ohki 13y ago
  That's not true at all, as Google as no way of surfacing new content. Write the best, most authoritative article on a topic in the world, and if you simply put it out there without doing marketing (getting others to link to it), no one will ever find it on Google. If it's in the SERP it will be on page 9000. This is the biggest mistake I see startups doing, simply creating content and hoping it surfaces to the top of Google.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    One article won't get any site ranked, but a site with many good articles will build traffic regardless of SEO. Saying otherwise is selling snake oil.

hahla 13y ago

Where are you getting your valuation multiple from? You seem extremely confident in stating "You'd probably be looking at about $10k for it usually: trailing year's proven revenue." I've been a successful website broker for many years now, and I have never seen anyone using trailing year's proven revenue in practice. In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history.

programminggeek 13y ago
On Flippa, 1 year trailing revenue is about average or maybe current/average month revenue x 12 months. Anyhow, some are more, some are less, but that's about where the market prices seem to be.
vasco 13y ago
What would be the first few avenues you should consider?
lingben 13y ago
> Flippa is usually the last avenue you should consider if you own a site with traffic and revenue history. So what would you recommend if not flippa?
gabemart 13y ago
>In my opinion with a few simple changes she could have gotten quite a bit more than $36k from the site. Could you very briefly explain what kind of changes you're talking about? I have a site I haven't updated in years that gets ~120k page views per month with about $2.30 EPM and I have no idea what to do with it.

unhappyhippie 13y ago

I disabled ABP on the thecupcakeblog but I still don't see any ads.