Are the Brits really better at Website Flipping?

[flipfilter]

Hi,

I've made a similar post at the Warrior Forum but thought it would be useful to share this here, especially with this being a British born forum!

The long and short of it is that it seems the British create better "quality" flips than our US counterparts - "


We’ve just been working on a tool to predict what a website will fetch at auction based on historical sale values on Flippa, Digital Point, Webmasters Marketplace and Website Broker. This involved analysing the relationship that various factors had, or didn’t have on the final price and one of these was the TLD type (e.g. .com or .org)

We tried to find a natural grouping, simply because we didn’t have the time to analyse the relationship for every TLD, so, for example, .net .org and .edu could all be grouped together in a similar band.

What we found was surprising, so I thought I’d share it here and hopefully it will make an interesting read.

The full table is on our site http://www.flipfilter.com/website-av...omain-type.php


.co.uk - $921

.com - $797

.org - $413

.biz - $302

.net - $280

I feel the two biggest surprises were

1) .co.uk sites came out on top – At first I suspected that this could be due to a few large sales skewing the data but this wasn’t the case. The sites sold were just more targeted, established sites with traffic and revenue.

2) .biz outranked .net. Again, this wasn’t due to a data skew. I have no idea why .biz sites seemed to attract more bids and more money on average, although I’m quite sure it has nothing to do with the domain.

We accept that in most cases, the lower .com average is skewed by the fact most starter sites are .com domains, but we can’t explain why the (I assume British) creators of .co.uk sites generally seem to attract more revenue?

Justin

[Thomas]

Justin - we meet again nice to see you over here too.

Being biased, of course the Brits are the best :P but joking apart, would you put some of this due to the strength of the pound relative to the dollar? Around a year ago, when the dollar was very weak, I was picking up some great sites and was able to pay "top dollar".

Also - the volume of .com's is very large with startup sites being sold all of the time, whereas with Nominet's restrictions on transferring .co.uk (also no whois protection) it may lead to quality over quantity - with less "flips".

Interesting statistics - but my argument would be the relative low value of the dollar to Brit's and the quantity of startup .com's sold.

Thomas

[flipfilter]

Hey Thomas,

Hope you're well.

It's an interesting one in that the answer seems clear initially but it does then raise further questions.

One theory is that language and copy will trump technical skills, and having English as our first language gives us a natural advantage in creating sites with a higher quality of on page content. This is in turn leads to more visitors and better conversions and hence a higher average sale price.

I may try to run a cross reference on the WHOIS data for all the coms, to see which ones are registered by GB citizens and check if those values also come out higher.

J

[Clinton]

.co.uk - $921

.com - $797

Flippa's doing a Google and geo-targeting the data it feeds you!

Seriously though, interesting post, and thanks for sharing that. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions on useful information people see in that data.

[flipfilter]

Flippa's doing a Google and geo-targeting the data it feeds you!

Seriously though, interesting post, and thanks for sharing that. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions on useful information people see in that data.

Damn You Flippa

I think it's also doing demographic profiling, as lately I'm seeing a lot listings for male impotency too

[DomainMagnate]

Interesting, probably because .co.uk sites involve mostly Brits, while .com sites belong to people from all over the world, so on average the Brits are more prosperous and are looking to buy/sell higher value items.

[Andy]

Hi Justin,

Interesting stats indeed. Of course if you go by the saying there are three kinds of lies: white lies, damn lies and statistics... I'm just saying. :-)

From an experiential point of view, I'd have to say as a group, the Brits are a pretty savvy bunch (Clinton, I'll take payment in USD please). Seriously though, some of the best stuff I've learned over the years have come from either the Isles or Australia. Canada has a strong contingent there.

I've got an Aussie mate whom I turn to when I need some extraordinary insight. He's got a natural hype meter second to none. I've also found some of the best built scripts and software to come from Oz.

Paul Hancox, a Brit through and through, offers an incredible wealth of knowledge about split testing, as does John Taylor. Other names escape me but if you want to know about testing, start with Paul.

My point is we, Yanks, even those of us with a strong Brit heritage, like to think of ourselves as the cutting edge of industry and this is just not so. Yes we can boast of quite a few accomplishments, innovations and so forth, but I'm continually astounded by what I learn from across the pond.

So would it surprise me to learn UK websites bring top dollar? No. However I'd very much like to learn more about the why.

Regards,

Andy

[Clinton]

Clinton, I'll take payment in USD please

I've only recently come to the UK, I'm Indian (and still carry the passport to prove it). Do you take Rupees?

The web was invented by the British Tim Berners Lee, wasn't it? (Despite what Al Gore likes to think )

But, yes, I too would be interested in knowing why there's a skew towards this ccTLD.

[Andy]

I thought Rupees was something that came up after drinking soda too fast? We shoulda had this worked out before.

Yes, the Internet was AlGore's just ask him. He also didn't invent Global Climate Warming Change but he did write a fantasy about it.

Over here, the term "Native American" is preferred. Not sure why. I'm American and I"m a native - ask my wife.

And now I revert control of this thread back to Justin, who, I'm sure, will tell us more about his fantastic statistical engine thingy.

[Clinton]

Over here, the term "Native American" is preferred.

If I'm Native American it's because you lot still haven't worked out that India is a country, not a US reservation