Thread: Would you buy a website or just start your own?

I don't understand your question, do you currently own this website and someone is offering to buy it from you or does someone else own this website and you offered to buy it from them for $200?

If you're buying the website from them, I would definitely host it elsewhere.

And it really depends on what you're looking to do with the site / what your revenue model is.

Depends on what you want to achieve.

What is your goal?

Example: If your goal is to start a website about buying and selling land, and monetize it, then buying it can be a good option to get a faster start.

If you buy "into" an existant website that is not performing well (or not being monetized at all), having a plan for what you want to do with it before buying it is importent.

-----------------

A few considerations if the website fits your goal:

Traffic: What traffic is the website generating right now? What type of traffic is this? (search engines, advertised, referral etc ) - ask the owner of the website for analytic traffic reports.
Monetization: Is the website generating any income?
Content: Didn't read the articles - do you think that owning the "history" of articles will be a big bonus? Are they quality articles, or just space fillers?
Design: I would say it is pretty much non existant - you could do better almost instantly by starting a new one.
SEO: How well has the website been performing? Does it rank on keywords you would like it to rank?
Owner: who is the owner of the website? If it has such a big "potential" why is he selling it for only 200$, and not realizing this potential himself?

The bottom line
200$ for a website is cheap. You usually get what you pay for.
If you find value in this website, buy it.

Goodluck!

It's got a decent PageRank probably because it's an old domain more than anything else. I don't see a lot of traffic going to it.

If you're already in that industry then jump on it for $200 and get your own hosting. The site can be moved in a snap.

Davidla is right, you could achieve the same results from scratch in relatively short time.

If it was me, for this site in particular, I'd grab it and get more traffic coming to it. Flipping it later if I wasn't making enough dollars for me. It could be flipped for way more $$$ than being asked.

It's funny the opportunities you see when your eyes are open to seeing them...

If I were to buy this site, I'd scrap the WP design entirely and create a better revenue model. Start with a clean slate.

As is, this site is pretty much crap in my opinion, just a bunch of articles. What value is it providing?? Little to none.

How could you change the format of the site so that it *does* provide value? Might take a year or so to actually build it up to the point where it is generating revenue, but then you could scale from there.

Here's a clue - think of a "freemium" model you could create for this site...

Of course, recreating the site would cost well beyond the $200 you're paying to acquire the site, so that's something to keep in mind as well. May be better off using a different domain name.

Haha, that probably wasn't very helpful after all, was it?

Look at it this way, would you rather buy a business or build your own?
Would you rather buy a franchise or start your own brand?

Similar trade offs imo...