Are the Brits really better at Website Flipping?

[Michelle]

I love stats so thanks for offering some up here.

When you say:
....but we can’t explain why the (I assume British) creators of .co.uk sites generally seem to attract more revenue?
do you mean seem to attract more revenue at the site itself or do you mean attract a higher average final bid price at auction/sale?

Is it possible to see the raw data? How many sites were in each set?

[flipfilter]

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.

Hi Andy, I did try to register fantasticstatisticalenginethingy.com but figured it might be mispelt...mostly by the Americans who seem to mispell everything :-P

Is it possible to see the raw data? How many sites were in each set?

Hi Michelle.

I think it was a case of both, but I'll have a double check when I get a free minute. In the past, I was refering to the sale price being higher although, I think if we looked, revenue would be higher too.

I 'll see if I can get a link up an edited csv (as I'm sure you can understand, I'll have to take out most things and just leave in the TLD and price, and possibly the domain itself but it will show you in more depth why this average came to be)

[Clarkie]

What a fantastic excuse to say the Queen must be doing something right in Britiain! All those republicans in Britain should notice that we are better at website flipping and clearly this must be influenced by the Queen!

On a more serious note - if I were creating a site aimed at a UK market I would use .co.uk. I would use .com, .net, .org etc for something that could be used on an international level. This would probably result in a more specific and targetted market and that potentially allows you to more easily focus on clients as if something is more local and focused you're more likely to know who you're dealing with. Through that you can find out exactly what they want to make your site the best it can be.

Obviously you could argue the domain wouldn't have much influence over that, you could target a .com in the same way. Yet I think people see .co.uk domains as being a local thing and that can inspire a sense of trust. I'd never consider purchasing a product from a small company from abroad. If I bought something from a smaller company I'd do it from someone in the UK as it just feels as though I've got that safety net there. I know more about the law in the UK as that's where I'm from.

This could all be nonsense but it's just my theory.

[crabfoot]

When people want to sell things in the UK they use UK domains. It is a large market, but only about a third as large as the US.

Now, when you speak English as a second language well enough to be able to compose web copy, are you going to aim at the English market or the US market?

So you get some site that need on work for because the writer not top ranking extra super duper experienced hack. Other factor is native experiencing what happen - not really know what happens in UK or US because trying to flip sites for air fair to go looky, see if likee.

You don't need good English to do good SEO. You do need good English to produce a good site. I'm reminded of a Chinese bloke that took the Meathead and Bryanon site flipping course and was so pleased with his first flip that he had to post in the forum and tell everybody about it. He was so proud of the original content that he'd written himself - and it was close to unintelligible.

Those sort of sites are worth buying for the traffic, and people will buy them if they have good traffic figures. If they already have traffic and income, they are the easiest sort of site to improve and build on - all you need is good copy. They aren't "starter sites", because they have that traffic element.

They will be mainly on .com and .net domains because that aims them at the larger market. Accepted wisdom is that those are the major TLDs to aim for.

I think you want to be looking at the geo locations of the site vendors. Lump together US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ vendors, leave out the rest of the world, and see what that does to the figures.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, yknow.

[mikeb]

Two questions not evident from the results :

(a) Were the results statistically significant - so the size and distribution of the data set needs considering - it could simpy be acceptable random variations.

(b) Is the dominant factor , british buyers, british sellers or british sites, it could be any of the above, and without insights into the selling medium it is probably hard to tell which. Knowing the nationalities of buyers and sellers the influence of british buyers and british sellers could be seen using .com results only.

It is easy to pull random noise out of data, and get causality back to front.

If significant , the brits could simply be the greatest suckers to sell to!

[TheodoreK]

I am confident this is another "correlation does not imply causation" case.

I don't dispute the stats but it seems far-fetched to extrapolate that "Brits are better site flippers" from those stats alone.

[DomainMagnate]

We just have a higher percentage of Brits on the forum, so it's a simple case of confirmation bias, if there were a lot of French folks on the forum we'd have the same thread about the French, but, hey, we all know that can't be true