Has anyone acquired a content site / blog?
June 05, 2024
by a searcher from University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School in Los Angeles, CA, USA
I'm looking at a few content sites that monetize from display ads, affiliate marketing, and sponsored content. Would appreciate any POV on what makes this type of business competitive in the long run, and potential impact of cookie-less future & AI.
in Toronto, ON, Canada
Using Google Adsense on its own, you need a lot of traffic - if you're serious about monetizing via ads, you have to get to the point where you can get onto Ezoic (but I find their ad density overwhelming) or the best is Mediavine, but you need something like 50K visitors per day (I could be wrong on the exact number)
Personally - at least for my niche - finance, Bitcoin, contrarianism - the model is to monetize via a mailing list, which you should be building no matter what.
You can send offers to the email list, affiliate, CPA, CPL, in good times, even CPC (now are not good times). The ideal, is having your own product funnel.
So you get traffic to the site, maybe a small subscription (i.e via Patreon) gets them ad-free and some premium content.
Then a paid newsletter, then other backend products.
If you've never done this before - then go to a guy like Jaryd Kraus ("Buying Online Web Businesses") and at least download his free due dilligence kit, but you'd be well served to take his course or hire his team to do due dilligence on your first purchase.
Most of the content sites offered for sale are complete garbage, people fake traffic, use linkfarms, especially now, AI generate content - nearly everything you see on Flippa is stuff nobody else wanted.
Not sure on your budget, but a good filter is to buy something already making at least $1000/month in ads and has a mailing list already.
Don't buy any content site that is pre revenue - they're all turnkey and auto-generated.
Podcasts:
Buying Online Web Businesses (Jaryd Kraus)
Niche Pursuits
Authority Hacker - you could also sign up here for their paid membership but they only open it a couple times a year, it's like 3K or so, but it's lifetime.
in Toronto, ON, Canada
This one also distressed - operator exiting the space, large mailing list with a sub-par open rate, but it's been around since 2010 or so, well known and came with a few other perks. We can use it in our network - but again, this is low intensity stuff - it's not really going to generate revenue, it's more like a top-of-funnel for the rest of the portfolio.
Really dirt cheap though. So I couldn't pass it up.