Can websites sell for millions with just traffic, no revenue?

[Tony I]

I understand every situation is different (Strength of Google ranking, specific industry, quality of traffic) , but in my case I am planning on building a marketplace site that connects buyers and sellers. (niche).

I believe I can get this site to reach 200K visitors a day (highly scalable). With some ads and affiliate stuff, what would an estimated value of this website be? Is it worth pursing?

 

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[Pure5abi]

It can. Look at instagram. No revenue and millions of followers when facebook bought them for 1 billion.

 

[jayo2k]

I understand every situation is different (Strength of Google ranking, specific industry, quality of traffic) , but in my case I am planning on building a site that connects people.

I believe I can get this site to reach 200K visitors a day (highly scalable). With some ads and affiliate stuff, what would an estimated value of this website be? Is it worth pursing?

Look at tumblr, instagram (on top of that, none of them are making any revenue as of today...). Add twitter who keeps getting fund with no revenue at all...
BUT it is not easy trust me... It takes hard work. Ask yourself "Why people will want to come to your site...?" To have freinds? They have facebook, to follow? They have twitter etc... find an original way. at the begining you will be the sole user of your site... then with hard work and time, you will see like one user registration and 1 post once a while... but the problem is most webmaster tend to give up when they do not get the desired result... It takes long... very long. Even facebook took long to explode... Look at pinterest... it took them like 4 years to explode...
The keys is to make yourself known, have a couple of hundreds of visitors then contact ventures to funds you, then grow up. Keep in mind that no venture will even consider you if your alexa ranking is well over 100 000...
My goal is just like yours... building a social website and selling it or get funds. I have the social website, my traffic is increasing, my rank is getting better each days but not near the 100 000 mark. Right now I am at 1 777 000 and 1 months ago I wasn't even ranked (Meaning I was above 30 000 000).

My goal is to make my website an authority one, having a share button other website could place on their site to share their contents on my website, kind of like the G+ button or the facebook like button

 

[Tony I]

Look at tumblr, instagram (on top of that, none of them are making any revenue as of today...). Add twitter who keeps getting fund with no revenue at all...

Very true, but my site is more of a marketplace niche site then a social networking site. Similar to eBay, but for a different demographic.

 

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[ZDS]

If it's a market place why can't you squeeze revenue out of it?

 

[goodfella]

Keep in mind that no venture will even consider you if your alexa ranking is well over 100 000...

Honestly, the alexa ranking is somewhat biased because they can only track visitors who have the alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. This means that more tech related sites will have a lower alexa (-100k) ranking while other types of sites will have a higher alexa ranking.

 

[Tony I]

If it's a market place why can't you squeeze revenue out of it?

I feel like I have to build enough traffic before I start charging fees for the service. If I charge people to list an item, it is the same thing as eBay. My USP is "no listing fees".

Also, it is targeted toward people in my age group (teens, early 20s.) that most likely do not have PayPal to process payments.

 

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[jayo2k]

Honestly, the alexa ranking is somewhat biased because they can only track visitors who have the alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. This means that more tech related sites will have a lower alexa (-100k) ranking while other types of sites will have a higher alexa ranking.

I know but ventures and publisher do not give a damn about what we think about alexa and the sad part is that their opinion matter more than our if we want to make money...

 

[AllenCrawley]

I feel like I have to build enough traffic before I start charging fees for the service. If I charge people to list an item, it is the same thing as eBay. My USP is "no listing fees".

Also, it is targeted toward people in my age group (teens, early 20s.) that most likely do not have PayPal to process payments.

There are other ways to monetize the site and I would think you would have to do so in order to sell it for that kind of money. I just don't think traffic alone will cut it.

• Since it is your site you can create your own storefronts and sell your own products.
• You could place ads on the site but your storefront owners may not appreciate the potential customers being lead away from their storefront.
• You could offer a premium listing for a fee and/or offer featured storefront on the homepage.
• Once you built up a good number of storefront owners you could offer storefront packages in addition to no listing fees option (look at goodsmiths dot com as an example).
• You'll also want to build an email list with all that traffic. Again, you could offer adspace to storefront owners within your emails. You could offer your own products or affiliate product. Even if you don't monetize that list the property would become that much more valuable.

 

[healthstatus]

I had 8+ million visitors to my main website last year, people that are interested in buying want to see revenue numbers and so far all offers are a multiple of that.

So you need to have more traffic than I get, to get into that realm of, with that much traffic, we're bound to make money somehow kind of offer.

How are you going to pay for servers and bandwidth to cover 200k visitors a day? I'm north of $10k a year in server expenses.

 

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[Tony I]

I had 8+ million visitors to my main website last year, people that are interested in buying want to see revenue numbers and so far all offers are a multiple of that.

Wow, so no big offers just based on that traffic, only revenue?

How are you going to pay for servers and bandwidth to cover 200k visitors a day? I'm north of $10k a year in server expenses.

That is true, without revenue there is no way to support those costs. All high traffic websites need to pay that much?

Thank you for all the info, might have saved me from wasting a lot of time.

 

[SportsFan438]

I may be off here, but saying you can get 200K visitors to your site a day and actually doing it are very different things. If you could really pull that in and get 73,000,000 visitors a year, Im sure you would have some really big offers regardless of revenue. If you are really going to quit because you cant pay for the price of the amount of users you get, its seems a bit odd to me, because someone out there would certainly be willing to invest.

 

[Tony I]

I may be off here, but saying you can get 200K visitors to your site a day and actually doing it are very different things.

Absolutely. I am thinking in terms of the potential the site has.

If you are really going to quit because you cant pay for the price of the amount of users you get, its seems a bit odd to me, because someone out there would certainly be willing to invest.

True, but I don't want to invest my time in something that in a best case scenario costs me thousands a year to run and makes no revenue. How do I convince investors to come on board if the site makes little to no $?

 

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[Tom.V]

As ZDS said, if this is a market place, why would you have a trouble generating revenue? Because with those numbers(200,000 visitors daily), it would not be hard at all. Just running your own advertisements relevant to the site with crappy affiliate offers converting at around 1% of the time would hit around $2k gross revenue daily. That's $60k per month.

True, but I don't want to invest my time in something that in a best case scenario costs me thousands a year to run and makes no revenue. How do I convince investors to come on board if the site makes little to no $?

Quite simply, you must take a risk. If the market is speaking to you, and telling you it needs this problem solved, then solve that problem.

 

[SportsFan438]

True, but I don't want to invest my time in something that in a best case scenario costs me thousands a year to run and makes no revenue. How do I convince investors to come on board if the site makes little to no $?

Investors are looking at growth and potential revenue. If you had 200K visitors to your site daily, then there is a lot of potential revenue.

 

[AmyQ]

Does your idea rely primarily on user generated content? If so, then generating revenues may be a legitimate secondary concern. The examples high traffic/low revenue examples that other posters have mentioned are good examples of this: instagram and twitter. User generated content will require you to create painless ways for your users to interface with your website and supply/share their content.

 

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[paqman]

but in my case I am planning on building a marketplace site that connects buyers and sellers. (niche).

Spend some time and watch SharkTank (cliche, I know). But you get to see the mindset of investors. They want potential rewards that outweigh the risk of investing. They want a model that has proven revenue, established or growing market, and the ability to cash out before they lose too much of their initial seed capital.

I worked a deal with a relative scam artist. His "idea" was going to rival that of MySpace (which at the time was the big dog, before Facebook was even a thought on Zuckerberg's radar). Long story short, his phantom investors all dissolved, the guy was a total scammer (still) and nothing ever came of it.

An idea is rarely worth a million bucks. However, the proper and focused execution, taking an action, seeding an idea into a market... that is what's worth a million dollars - self made or angel funded. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone on this board has a handful of GREAT ideas each and every day... How many of them will even get off the ground is another story.

As others have mentioned, getting 200k visitors a day is no small feat. You're talking about 6m visitors a month. Relative to that, look at sites like eBay, who've been around for a very long time and they put up 29m/mo. You think you can quickly handle the market cap, costs, bandwidth fees, server maintenance, etc to match over 20% of what eBay does on bootstrap? Not impossible, but not likely.

Test your idea. Get the site built, get to market, see if you can generate interest. Without spending too much, see if it has legs. Look at places like Craigslist, Angieslist for inspiration. Small, ugly, and bootstrapped in a specific niche. The market grew WITH the idea, they built it and now generate revenue and sustainability.

I can push 200k visitors per day to any website, of purely unqualified traffic, for a cost of $2k-4k/day. But again, unqualified mass traffic is just that... not going to get you sold to Google or Facebook for $1b.

Test, test, and test. If you believe in your idea, have passion, and the model is supported by a growing demand/market, run with it. If you try it, and it fails, at least you'll be better off than 90% of "entrepreneurs" who have great ideas and never try them...

Or, jump over to Flippa or similar sites and look to buy and build a business from someone who has done the hard work of getting it started. Maybe you are more of an operations master than an idea master? Just, whatever you do, don't stop drilling the extra 1 foot where the oil "should be"... keep pushing.

 

[Tony I]

Basically, its going to be a posting website similar to ebay, but without fees and tailored to a specific niche. 200K is an extremely rough number, I am not too experienced with internet marketing/websites.

The main reason I asked this question is because one of one of my start-up competitors offers the same service for free. The site was made only a few months ago, and has a decent design.

Should I
1. start my website off with free listing fees to gain traffic, then begin charging for the service? That way I can compete with the other site?

2. Keep it entirely free and try to sell it off traffic?

3. Or should I charge a small monthly fee to list ($1.99). Problem with this is that people would choose the other site over mine, because is free.

I really appreciate all of the input guys, can't tell you how valuable this site is to me.

 

[DennisD]

Basically, its going to be a posting website similar to ebay, but without fees and tailored to a specific niche. 200K is an extremely rough number, I am not too experienced with internet marketing/websites.

The main reason I asked this question is because one of one of my start-up competitors offers the same service for free. The site was made only a few months ago, and has a decent design.

Should I
1. start my website off with free listing fees to gain traffic, then begin charging for the service? That way I can compete with the other site?

2. Keep it entirely free and try to sell it off traffic?

3. Or should I charge a small monthly fee to list ($1.99). Problem with this is that people would choose the other site over mine, because is free.

I really appreciate all of the input guys, can't tell you how valuable this site is to me.

Stop trying to compete on price. You're mentioned making a site similar to ebay but for a niche? Well ebay charges, and they always have. There have always been 'free' competitors and alternatives to hit products. Stop worrying about it. Make YOUR thing as good as possible. People pay for quality services all the time.

Just go out there and build it. Stop worrying about your exit strategy and start worrying about your enter strategy. If you're reaching 200K people a day you won't want to sell the thing, even for a million. Just build it before your competitors get any bigger and figure out monetization along the way

 

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[mimedia]

Basically, its going to be a posting website similar to ebay, but without fees and tailored to a specific niche. 200K is an extremely rough number, I am not too experienced with internet marketing/websites.

You have a pretty big problem then. The "build it and they will come" thing is largely a myth. If you have no experience with internet marketing, you need to start learning and learning now. A great idea is worthless without execution, and you can't execute an idea on the internet without at least some rudimentary knowledge of internet marketing and business. With a little bit more experience and knowledge, you'll realize that your initial question is flawed because:

1. Where exactly did you get that 200k number from? It doesn't even sound like a rough estimate, it sounds 100% arbitrary.

2. The # of visitors doesn't matter. I have sites where each 1000 visitors nets me $5 at most, and other sites where 1000 visitors nets $100s.

Should I
1. start my website off with free listing fees to gain traffic, then begin charging for the service? That way I can compete with the other site?

2. Keep it entirely free and try to sell it off traffic?

3. Or should I charge a small monthly fee to list ($1.99). Problem with this is that people would choose the other site over mine, because is free.

I really appreciate all of the input guys, can't tell you how valuable this site is to me.

1. You haven't provided nearly enough information for anyone here to be able to answer this, although if you don't think you can compete if you charge a fee, isn't that a pretty clear answer to your question?

The first step would be to actually talk to potential customers and do some testing.

2. Why not focus on actually getting some traffic before worrying about selling it?

3. Again, stop worrying about what you should charge and actually figure what value you're offering customers, and how to get those customers in the first place.