Volume of information - Good BS indicator

[Clinton]

Exchanged a few emails with someone who wants to sell ymaf.com. Thought I'd see if it the site was worth posting here for you guys.

The last email I sent him asked for

...detailed breakdown for the existing earnings of $85K, where they came from, what the expenses were and all the documents to support your projections?

A month later I get his reply. There is no spreadsheet attached. But there are four lengthy documents talking and talking and talking about the potential and the size of the market and how big this site could get.

The executive summary is a multipage document with several repetitions and focusing on "potential". In the one line where income is mentioned it's accompanied by "despite the fact that we didn't use a sales force" and "in only 120 days" etc. There were three other long documents, none of which shed light on the original question.

Sometimes the volume of typed up information alone is enough to ring alarm bells. If the seller can't give a straight answer to the question and buries me with pages and pages of close print, unformatted text.... I can't help thinking that going through the whole due diligence process will be so painful it will make me weep and beg for a quick death.

Is it just me or do you too have trouble getting the right information?

[hooperman]

Is it just me or do you too have trouble getting the right information?

What I've found is that often after asking for hard facts there is a delay. After a week of silence I'll send another email saying "don't worry, if your profit/traffic isn't all that impressive, I may still be interested". In my limited experience, if there is a delay after asking for "the facts" the deal doesn't usually happen.

[benitez17]

It's not just you. It's bad enough when the person is actively trying to sell their site, but most of the people who I contact unsolicited about selling their site make vague references to "lots" of traffic and revenue and expect me to make an offer that will knock their socks off based on this information.

[DomainMagnate]

ymaf.com has an alexa of 24 million, am I missing something here?

[Clinton]

I suppose I was interested in checking it out because the only actual figures he had - first quarter earnings - were a very respectable $85K. This was driven by radio and press coverage and may not be reflected well in Alexa rankings.

[hooperman]

Recently I sent an email requesting access to Google Analytics to check traffic claims for a potential purchase. Simple request. The reply I got went like

From January to now the site has made about $6100 since it has not really been promoted much. The daily visitors are about 100-250 uniques per day due to the excellent front page organic rankings. What you want to consider is the fact that its on the top of the second page for the keyword "xxxx". This keyword has over 2.7 million searches monthly on google which equates to 32,400,000 searches annually. XXXX which is a multi million dollar company is currently in the first position for this keyword.

Thus the position for this keyword is the main selling point here as well as the first page position for the following keywords below. You can easily turn this into a $250,000 a year business given the right amount of promotion and product offers. I was even considering raising funds to promote it and change up the product offering package. Reason I am selling it is because I want to buy a large home considering the hot real estate market we are in, trying to acheive my dream home in a way, and I have other projects I need funding for.

So no GA access then.

The seller finally gave me access when pressed, but they didn't match the claims by a long stretch.

[Kay]

Also beware of people talking about "hits". Someone told me he had thousands of hits. Fair enough, when I saw the stats, he did. But he didn't seem to realise that hits doesn't mean the same as traffic.

As for GA - those stats never equate to anything like those from any of my cPanels. GA stats are always much, much lower. I don't understand why that should be the case. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?