Well I’m sure that most of you have heard about how Jason is selling theuniversitykid. the auction is here at sitepoint. and some of you have probably also heard that Sly from slyvision. is selling his site as well, you can view his auction here. Now if you are going to buy either of these sites make sure you say I referred you, Jason is giving a tidy sum to the referrer

But anyways, so these two bloggers are selling their sites, after about a year of blogging, what’s the signifance? Huge! Anybody with any type of blog are watching these auctions with batted breath. These are two very popular sites. Theuniversitykid is certainly much larger then slyvisions, with 1100+ subscribers and about twice as much traffic and links. It’s almost exactly twice as good in every category. Theuniversitykid is one of the top internet marketing blogs out there. According to 45n5′s top 100 list, theuniversitykids is #6, right up there with shoemoney john chow, and problogger. This sale is Big! Because every blogger wants to know the value of a popular blog. Now most likely the site will just go to another blogger, but we’ll have to see. Right now the top bid is 4,500$ which isn’t very much at all. Jason himself said he sold a site he ran for only a month, for 4,000$, so if a site of this caliber were to sell for this low, it would be very bad for the blogging industry. He’s trying to get his BIN offer of 15,000$ but right now that is looking doubtful. But still even if he get’s that, 15,000 is not very much for the potential a site like this could have. Jason showed stats showing he’s making 1,000 easily with almost no effort. If somebody who was good at monetizing, got a hold of it, he could easily be making a couple thousands a month, and would very quickly start making money on his investment.

Slyvisions is currently at 1,000$ but there is still a week on his auction. The BIN price is 9,500, which is pretty high if you compare it’s stats with theuniversitykid. He’s making only about 300$ a month from it, but again the potential is great. Both these sites are only around a year old.

You may be wondering why do we even care? The prices these blogs sell for, will set the standard for how much blogs will sell for in the future. Start hoping they go for really high! If they do, that would increase the value of all of our blogs. So keep an eye on these auctions.

Both these sites are being sold through sitepoint.com, which seems like a great way to sell your site if you are interested, but it doesn’t seem like the blog auctions have very many bids, so there may be a better option out there.

We can learn a few lessons from them though.  Since these sites have annouced they are selling, both of their subscriber’s amount have dropped significantly. Slyvisions went from 450 to 400, and it has only been on the auction for a couple days. Theuniversitykid has dropped from 1150 to 750. Now I’ve heard a few people say that this is probably from feedburner forgetting to add the email subscribers, this is possible. But Jason’s subscribers have been decreasing for several days, yesterday they were at about 900. So he’s definitely losing some subscribers at least. So you may be asking what can we learn from this? Well two things, first if you are selling your site, don’t post about it until mid-way through the auction. Telling your readers you’re leaving causes panic, and your numbers will start dropping. This will greatly effect the sale of your site, I would suggest waiting as long as you can. Second, don’t sell, unless you are Really going to sell. Don’t try and come back afterwards, you’ve got to try and regain your credibility and all those subscribers. Since the site didn’t sell for as much as he wanted to, Jason is now trying to hire guest posters to keep the site alive. Unless he can get some really good guest posters, it sounds like this will be a long stranglizing death for theuniversitykid. So if you are going to sell your site, I might even recommend doing it completely secretly. Put it up for auction, and if it doesn’t give enough, then just keep blogging. But leaving, then coming back, is not a good idea.

Now with that said, I wish the best of luck to Jason and Sly. They have two awesome sites, and I read them both frequently. But I think we can all learn from what they did.

Tags: selling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Bloggers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.