Here's a classic case of worthless listings

**3Six** · January 5th, 2010, 11:24 AM

Amnat registered for Flippa a couple of weeks ago and now has all of four auctions.

All four are carefully chosen in niches that attract expensive ads:
Horse Racing
Forex
Make Money Online
Trading Futures

He's spent maybe all of a day's time to set all four up and his total asking price is $1,580. Not bad money for four domains with worthless content.

But to the inexperienced eye it doesn't look like worthless content. He's populated the sites and does all the usual stuff of talking up the "potential" and how massive the market is etc.

He even shows in the Site Details that the sites are earning from Advertising Sales, Product Sales and Affiliate Income (yeah, right!). At least Flippa has stopped these people from posting income "potential" under the Revenue section of Site Details as existing revenue.

What are the chances that he'll sell any of them? My call is zero. He's just wasted $19 x 4 and a lot of time. He'll discover it doesn't work and he'll move on. And another sucker will take his place.

Where do these people get the idea that they can make money from this?

**Clinton** · January 5th, 2010, 12:42 PM

You'll like this DP thread on how to do autoblogs without attracting a penalty.

The content, apparently, can be got from "article directories, yahoo answer, fello blogs, news feeds, etc... there is also a free wordpress plugin available"

**tke71709** · January 5th, 2010, 01:07 PM

Originally Posted by 3Six

What are the chances that he'll sell any of them? My call is zero. He's just wasted $19 x 4 and a lot of time. He'll discover it doesn't work and he'll move on. And another sucker will take his place.

He only needs to sell one of every 20 to break even. Once he gets a few sales under his belt (even to shill accounts) his trust will increase and so will the likelihood of selling more of them.

We diss these scams, but they can be profitable if you're in a third world country or can hire third worlders to do the work for you and you just list the sites.

**Clinton** · January 5th, 2010, 01:46 PM

The trust issue - yes, that's a whole different ball game on its own. Like the ebay sellers hawking £1 items to build up a feedback reputation.

Flippa has made a lot of changes to the trust scoring. I've fallen behind on this and I don't know how it works anymore. I wonder how many first time buyers would be able to judge a seller's rep relative to how trustworthy he really is.

**benitez17** · January 6th, 2010, 08:58 PM

Originally Posted by tke71709

He only needs to sell one of every 20 to break even. Once he gets a few sales under his belt (even to shill accounts) his trust will increase and so will the likelihood of selling more of them.

We diss these scams, but they can be profitable if you're in a third world country or can hire third worlders to do the work for you and you just list the sites.

No one who has a clue is paying $395 for any of those sites. He'd be lucky to get the $19 he spent on a listing for any of them. I don't think he can sell even one out of 100 for his BIN price.

**mpcovcd** · January 6th, 2010, 10:31 PM

Unfortunately people are buying this junk which is why the number of cookie cutter sites is increasing by the day and making it harder for everyone to find quality websites..

**tke71709** · January 7th, 2010, 07:16 AM

Originally Posted by benitez17

No one who has a clue is paying $395 for any of those sites. He'd be lucky to get the $19 he spent on a listing for any of them. I don't think he can sell even one out of 100 for his BIN price.

There are lots of people without a clue buying on Flippa, hell I'd say it's a large majority of their buyers.

I was in discussions with a person who was looking at selling a site on Flippa last year, eventually he listed the site on Flippa/SP Marketplace and sold it for several thousand dollars (it was a good site, but it had no revenue, but tons of "potential"). After the guy bought it he started asking a tons of questions like where do I get a host, how does hosting work, etc...

We're talking webmaster 101 here.

So there are total amateurs out there with money to burn who do buy sites.

**Clinton** · January 7th, 2010, 07:59 AM

It would be interesting to analyse how many of those chancers actually sold their sites ... and how many sites they sold. Do they sell 1 in 20 or whatever figure they need go past break even? And how do you tell? I suppose if a seller was on to his 100th sale then it's an indication that he's doing something right. So far, I see people with maybe 10-20 completed sales... wouldn't that volume be insufficient to tell them whether their "business model" works or stinks?

**othelloRob** · February 1st, 2010, 02:42 PM

Originally Posted by tke71709

So there are total amateurs out there with money to burn who do buy sites.

People are (by-and-large) lazy and greedy, which is why there are so many "cookie-cutter" websites/business sold on places like ebay/dp/flippa etc for hundreds of $ daily, which arent worth the domain registration fee.

I know a couple of hosts who get all their business selling these established business makeing $1000000000/week junk drop-ship sites - so yes, there is an almost endless supply of people who will buy this kind of thing.