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Hottie Blogger Selling Out?
By Max | June 14, 2007
Another interesting sale at Sitepoint just popped onto my radar a day ago. It appears Career Ramblings, of which Jane May is part owner is up for sale. Just a couple weeks ago I analyzed another blog for sale called NetBusinessBlog. The interesting thing is that both of these blogs were started within the last 8 months or so, and both have ties to John Chow. Jane May spent the last week guest blogging for John, while NetBusinessBlog used John’s site for some promotional help.
There are people out there who start blogs or other sites and promote the hell out of them. Then they put the sites up for sale and pocket a decent return for their efforts. Of course the new owner of these sites will also have to be good at promotions in order to maintain the revenues. I wonder if these two blog sales were started with a short term exit strategy in mind or if its just coincidence and the owner needed to get out for other reasons. Certainly the owners of these blogs have done a great job with promotions and building up solid traffic and revenue numbers.
Regarding CareerRamblings specifically, I don’t think I like the site as a potential acquisition. Don’t get me wrong, I like the site. It is well put together and has decent content. There are two reasons I wouldn’t want to buy it though.
1. I think it would be difficult to maintain a regular readership with this topic. A lot of the articles are geared towards finding a job, and once someone has found a job, they’ll probably stop visiting.
2. The CPM rate they are hitting is $30 CPM. Thats an incredibly high rate. Ideally, you want to look for sites with very low CPMs because that leaves room for improvement without having to grab new traffic. Its much more difficult to improve revenues for a site with a high CPM. That being said blogs do seem to achieve higher CPMs than other types of sites. I think ReviewMe has a lot to do with that. NetBusinessBlog was achieving $75 CPM. Thats incredible.
I would suggest if you were going to buy a blog to buy one that gets decent traffic, but has much lower earnings. Less than $5 CPM would be ideal. Then try to drive that number up. If you manage to have the same success as the owners of CareerRamblings, and reach $30 CPM, then you will be making a pile of cash as you just increased the value by six times.
Topics: Website Valuation |
