Some stats from Flippa

[Clinton]

I was curious as to how many of the sites that show up as sold actually did sell.

How do you find out? You can check each domain in WHOIS to see if it changed hands. But that's not infallible. Knowing eBay and how people harrass till you leave them feedback, I figured that sellers in the Flippa marketplace would be keen for feedback and would chase buyers for it. So I decided to look at feedback.

Now Flippa gives members 30 days to leave feedback so I had to choose auctions that ended over 30 days ago. I went to Dec 13th and viewed all the auctions from there back to Dec 10th - 4 days worth. This is what I found.

40 auctions ended with an apparently successful sale.
Out of those, 33 were templates and I didn't bother digging into which ones changed hands
Here are the remaining 7:

http://flippa.com/auctions/80433/Pre...ntial-Election
$20,000
No feedback either way. WHOIS hasn't changed. Sold twice in Flippa marketplace
My call: Not sold at all

http://flippa.com/auctions/80611/Qua...cial-Icon-Site
$750 - serial seller but seems to sell slightly established sites so I've included him. Sold

http://flippa.com/auctions/79275/PR2...month-earnings
$1000. Listed twice in the markplace. Shows as sold. Doesn't look like it.
My call: Not Sold

http://flippa.com/auctions/80311/Lar...bsite-For-Sale
$7,000
Seems sold. Smooth transaction

http://flippa.com/auctions/80566/Ult...eady--Must-See
$497
No feedback received. A quick couple of checks suggest that whois was last updated on Dec 14, but ownership hasn't changed.

http://flippa.com/auctions/80434/Car...ent-SE-traffic
$225
May have sold

http://flippa.com/auctions/79768/FadDietsThatWork-com
$ Unknown.
Not Sold. In fact, he has lots and lots of unsold listings

Three sites definitely sold and as many as 4-5 may have sold. So, not a lot of sites sold.

But what emerged is a surprising bouyancy in the sale of templates. There seems to be a huge demand, some shady sellers, yes, but also some sellers genuinely creating decent startups, describing them accurately without any of the BS and helping buyers by setting it up with the host etc. (going by comments in the feedback)

Flippa won't change their tag from "Buy and sell websites" to "Buy and sell templates" but the market seems very active for templates. And where there's an active market there's money to be made whether or not you're into creating templates.

What do you think?

[tke71709]

By templates do you mean actual web site templates or are you talking about cookie cutter start up sites with no traffic/revenue?

[DomainMagnate]

I recall reading somewhere that 40% of sold sites are actually sold. Not sure where.. probably somewhere on this forum actually
This seems to be on par with it.

I guess most interesting would be to check these stats on higher priced listings.

[Clinton]

@tke71709, I mean the start up sites.

[nEquity]

This is interesting investigative work.

I definitely think a lot of these transactions are never completed in the end. Its unfortunate, but its just so difficult. Some guy creates a profile and wants to buy, gets bid happy, then cold feet and runs off. He has no risk of ever being caught out. Difficult thing to stop.