My Music Website for Sale - Huge recurring income on complete autopilot!

**ashivasw** · October 13th, 2011, 03:23 AM

Hello everyone,

DESCRIPTION & DETAILS
www.mp3pa.com is a smart and intelligent MP3 music search engine which has a global Alexa Traffic Rank: 32,130 as on 13-Oct-2011.
The domain was purchased on 23rd Jul, 2010 from GoDaddy.com for 2 years. Hosting again is from GoDaddy and runs on a "Dedicated CentOS" server with good configuration.

FINANCIAL DETAILS
My website is currently earning around $3000 USD per month and has the potential to easily scale up "multi-fold" (I can help!).
All the revenue that is coming in, is through advertising only. Expenses include hosting fees for the "Dedicated CentOS" server which is 100 USD per month and nothing else. The rest of the revenue generated is just pure profits.

TRAFFIC DETAILS
On an average, the website receives about 55K (fifty five thousand) visitors per day which means 1.6 million visitors per month. Also, there are close to 4 million pageviews per month. Although the website receives traffic from all over the world, more than 60% of traffic is from asian countries and around 8-10% from the USA.

HOW MUCH WORK?
Well, I have written cron jobs that do everything for me. Right now, I just ensure that the website is up and running. Absolutely nothing else to do.
Any buyer of this website will enjoy hands-off income on complete autopilot. But, if the intent is to increase the revenue beyond 3K USD per month, then you can do a lot of things!

ASKING PRICE: I guarantee that this website gives you recurring income month on month on complete Autopilot (Hands-Free) and you can easily make 5 figures every year.
Asking price - $240K USD, Please PM me if you are interested and I can send the NDA and any other details you may ask for.

**meathead1234** · October 13th, 2011, 08:26 AM

Is there a typo on your asking price?

**ashivasw** · October 13th, 2011, 09:52 AM

Not at all ! I am indeed asking 240K USD. However, I am open for any negotiations. Please PM me if you feel that this price is unrealistic along with some reasons why you feel so. All your suggestions and thoughts are valuable to me since I know I have lots to learn here.

I know how valuable my website is and the traffic has become two-fold in the last few months and I am currently doing SEO, SMO and Linkbuilding which are expected to further increase the traffic in the next 3-6 months.

Currently I receive 85% search traffic from Google, 13% direct traffic and the remaining 2% referral traffic.

**tke71709** · October 13th, 2011, 10:55 AM

In an effort to educate others who may be reading this thread I'll post my thoughts here. Please do not take any of the below personally.

Let's start with the basic issue here, you're asking for 240K for a site that makes approximately 3k a month or approximately 80 months revenue (7+years). And I'm assuming that is the amount made most recently, not as a historical average.

I'm not going to get into the issue of how many months revenue should a site sell for. Buyers will spout 10X, sellers will talk about how site XYZ sold for 40X. Let's all just agree that 80X is an extremely high valuation.

Let's look at the site (based on the information you have provided).

Pros
- Generates revenue (and more importantly profits)
- Automated
- High traffic figures

Cons
- Automated (what if something changes and the code needs to be fixed?). MEDIUM RISK
- Traffic is mostly from low value countries.
- Traffic is heavily reliant on Google (85%). This traffic can disappear overnight based on an arbitrary algo change. HIGH RISK
- Grey legal area. The legal system still hasn't quite figured out whether what you are doing is legal or not, it varies from country to country and even from judge to judge. As you are hosting the site in the USA I would, at a minimum, have to move everything to another country with more friendly copyright laws yet I would still be exposed as a citizen of Canada. MEDIUM RISK
- Low barriers to entry. (Disclaimer: I have not visited the site in question as I am at work) There is no moat around entering this market. Anyone can put together an MP3 search engine site for a much lower cost than what you asking for this one and put the additional money into advertising and SEO. The free loader (oops downloader) market is not overly difficult to get traffic in either. It actually makes me even more nervous that you are so reliant on Google SE traffic based on this. HIGH RISK
- Lack of history. The site is a year and a half old. MEDIUM RISK depending on the earnings history

General comments
- "But, if the intent is to increase the revenue beyond 3K USD per month, then you can do a lot of things!' - If it were that easy to increase the revenue then you would certainly do so before you listed the site for sale. Shrewd buyers are often turned off by the claims that sellers make about "potential".
-"I guarantee that this website gives you recurring income month on month on complete Autopilot (Hands-Free) and you can easily make 5 figures every year." = 5 figures is 10k, you can meet that guarantee and we still wouldn't make our money back until 24 years later. Also, this type of guarantee would never be enforceable.

Best of luck with your sale.

**Clinton** · October 13th, 2011, 11:05 AM

Originally Posted by ashivasw

I know how valuable my website is ...

ashivasw, may I ask how you've calculated the value of your website? You've quoted $240K, not a round $250K or $200K so I'm assuming you used some logic/reasoning in coming to that value decision. Would you share that with us?

**ashivasw** · October 13th, 2011, 11:51 AM

Thanks tke71709 for your comments.

@clinton: I came up with this number 240K USD based on a similar MP3 website which was sold for 100x the monthly income by my friend few months back. He was able to sell it for 100x because he had affiliate sales as well which gave 20% extra income than I am quoting. Hence, I thought I was reasonable.

Anyways, fair enough... This is a learning to me...

What would be the maximum price I can get for this kind of a website?

**meathead1234** · October 13th, 2011, 11:58 AM

In a niche like this, I think you would do well to get $24k, hence why I wondered if there was a typo in your OP.

**ashivasw** · October 13th, 2011, 12:15 PM

Ok meathead1234.

I am thoroughly disappointed now. Are you saying that 8x the monthly income is a fair deal? that too for something on complete autopilot? I simply can't believe this. This means that the buyer can recover all his money in just 8 months and the rest will be pure profits without having to do anything to maintain this kind of website.

Well, the algorithm is good and crawlers are excellent and this is not just another MP3 website which anyone can put together. I believe we need to emphasize on quality here rather than any mathematics.

To all my friends on this forum, please wake up! We are talking real money here. $3K per month on complete autopilot is just outstanding.

All the SEO/SMO and linkbuilding work that I am doing right now is to build a brand name so that direct traffic starts coming in future. I am not even factoring this into the deal here. Even with the current situation, I feel 85% organic traffic could be risky as someone says and I totally agree. But, I want to mention that before the panda update that happened in April this year, my traffic was around 100K per day!!! (Yes, it is that much per day) and then It fell off to 40K per day and now it has reached 55K. Thanks to my SEO efforts as well. So, what I am saying is.... even in the worst case, it was 40K visitors per day and that is still awesome. I am sure I will come back to 100K visitors per day in the next few months. This means double the money than what we are talking now!

Looks like I can't even expect half my original price quoted. This is extremely disappointing!

Anyone else following this thread? Any more comments are welcome...

**tke71709** · October 13th, 2011, 01:05 PM

Originally Posted by ashivasw

Are you saying that 8x the monthly income is a fair deal? that too for something on complete autopilot? I simply can't believe this. This means that the buyer can recover all his money in just 8 months and the rest will be pure profits without having to do anything to maintain this kind of website.

I, personally, think 8X would be on the low side.

Well, the algorithm is good and crawlers are excellent and this is not just another MP3 website which anyone can put together. I believe we need to emphasize on quality here rather than any mathematics.

At the end of the day, a badly coded site clearing $3k a month and a well coded site
clearing $3k are going to be valued in a fairly similar fashion.

To all my friends on this forum, please wake up! We are talking real money here. $3K per month on complete autopilot is just outstanding.

It's nothing to scoff at but you're neglecting to factor in the risk factor that impacts the valuation.

All the SEO/SMO and linkbuilding work that I am doing right now is to build a brand name so that direct traffic starts coming in future. I am not even factoring this into the deal here.

Nor would most buyers.

Even with the current situation, I feel 85% organic traffic could be risky as someone says and I totally agree. But, I want to mention that before the panda update that happened in April this year, my traffic was around 100K per day!!! (Yes, it is that much per day) and then It fell off to 40K per day and now it has reached 55K. Thanks to my SEO efforts as well. So, what I am saying is.... even in the worst case, it was 40K visitors per day and that is still awesome.

Well the actual worst case would be that you get hit by another algorithm update and your traffic levels get slaughtered.

I am sure I will come back to 100K visitors per day in the next few months. This means double the money than what we are talking now!

No one can predict the moves of the great Googlemonster. For example, you could get hit with an algo update that pushes you down the SERPs or Google could decide to get into the music business and annihilate all the MP3 search engines in their index to destroy the competition.

Looks like I can't even expect half my original price quoted. This is extremely disappointing!

Don't let it get to you, it's worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, there may be someone willing to pay what you're asking. List it on Flippa and put a high reserve on it. If no one wants to buy it, you're still pulling in 3k a month for no work right?

I'd like to commend you on the level of maturity that you've displayed in this thread. Many people get defensive when they are challenged, especially when it comes to valuing their websites. You've handled the comments very well.

**meathead1234** · October 13th, 2011, 01:07 PM

You've just proven the point about SE traffic being risky by saying that you lost 50% of traffic after Panda.

I was merely stating my opinion. It's a risky niche, so an investor would definitely need to price that in to what they would be willing to pay. I didn't mean to hijack your sales thread either - I genuinely thought your asking price was a typo