We Are Looking To Buy Websites

Posted on October 30, 2012 by ibuysites

buy websites

Midascode Ltd is actively looking to buy websites

We have two options:

For sites earning $1000+ per month and
Sites earning less than $1,000 pm (or earning nothing at all).

a) Is your site one that has a lot of potential (even if it’s earning nothing now)?
b) Does it just need some marketing or some monetising?
c) Is it a promising site that you just don’t have time for any more?
d) Is your site ready for the next level, but you don’t have the skills to take it there?
e) Has your direction changed leaving you less time to work on your website?
f) Does your site or blog need a bit of investment to make it profitable?

If you’re looking to sell an “offline business”, please visit this site.

All You Wanted To Know About Website Buying & Selling

Posted on January 12, 2010 by ibuysites

Here’s a headsup: People wanting to discuss matters relating to the buying and selling of websites now have a new forum where they can chat with like minded individuals.

The quality of the chat is extremely high and though the forum is only a week old today, it boasts some of the most respected members from places like Sitepoint and elsewhere who advise on the subject. Already signed up are brokers, accountants and lawyers who deal with matters like Accountancy Due Diligence and Contracts of Sale, buyers and sellers. Flippa is there asking questions and getting feedback on how they can improve their service.

It’s a place where you can find out about the best places to buy a site, what scams to watch out for, what’s a fair price, how to perform due diligence, the best places to list a site for sale, how the pros make money from site holding and site flipping …and much more. Head on over and pose them your most difficult question.

If you interested in any aspect of website buying or selling – you need to be there. Go to the Experienced People forum right now. If yours is not an internet business, the related site for selling a business is this one.

Five Scary Things You Didn’t Know About Escrow.com

Posted on December 15, 2009 by ibuysites

When buying or selling a domain you are often dealing with a party you don’t know. Do you remit a large sum of money to them and trust them to transfer the domain to you? Probably not. But then again, they don’t know you either, so they can’t transfer the domain to you first in the hope that you will indeed keep your promise to pay them in full.

That’s where escrow companies come in.

An escrow company will take the full payment from the buyer and hold it till the seller transfers the goods. Once the buyer confirms that he’s received the goods the escrow company releases the funds to the seller. Should the buyer reject the goods, the escrow waits for the seller to confirm receipt back before they refund the payment to the buyer. So everyone’s safe.

But it’s important to choose a good, trusted escrow company to handle what is often a large sum of money. Who do you go to for that? The most well known name is escrow.com. Most experts in website buying and selling swear by escrow.com and they do so with the experience of many transactions behind them. But today I’m going to tell you five secrets that you really should know before you deal with them.

Five Things That You Did Not Know About Escrow.com and Which Should Scare You

1. There is no company called escrow.com. The company you are dealing with is IES that rents/leases or has some other arrangement involving the escrow.com domain (I don’t know what it is and you likely don’t either). That’s not a reason to distrust them but you need to know who you are dealing with. Should IES go bust sometime – no company is immune from the laws of finance – the escrow.com name will likely continue and many buyers and sellers will likely be unaware that anything has changed even though they may be dealing with a brand new company with no history! They’ll assume it’s the good, old escrow company they’ve always dealt with. On the escrow.com website, you’ll find bold claims about “services provided by escrow.com“. They flash “escrow.com” all over the site. Even their postal address is “escrow.com” (no mention of IES). You need to go to the small print to realise that it’s IES you’re dealing with and, in their own words, they are only “one of the operating subsidiaries of Escrow.com”.

Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting anything about IES’s current financial position. They may be rock solid for all I know. And do bear in mind that they are heavily regulated (more about that later) so they don’t do a runner with your money.

But “they” are not escrow.com.

2. Escrow.com/IES doesn’t provide an escrow service for websites: Seriously! It never ceases to amaze me how few people know this. Or realise the huge risk involved in putting website transactions through this company. IES has four categories: Motor Vehicle | Domain Name | General Merchandise | Services.

The closest you have to websites is “Domain Name” and people happily choose that as the closest match and think all is hunky dory. It’s not!

Risks for Buyer: You can end up getting just the domain name and none of the files, templates, designs, databases or anything else that is contained in the website you’re buying and, as far as IES is concerned, they’ll release the funds to the seller on the sole grounds that he has transferred the domain control to you.
Risks for Seller: You can transfer all the copyright, other rights, programs, files etc., to the ownership of the buyer and the buyer can then demand IES give him a refund because he’s changed his mind about taking control of the domain.

3. IES/escrow.com don’t give a fig leaf about your contract. In the purchase of a website the buyer and seller often negotiate terms and draw up a Sales Contract. It may say that certain conditions need to be met and that the buyer/seller can pull out of the transaction if there is a material change. Example: You agree with the seller that if his PR9 site suddenly drops to a PR4 then the deal is off. You send your funds to IES for them to hold during the 10 day “inspection period”. The seller changes the WHOIS for the site and sends you the password to take control of the domain. But on the very first day you find that the PR has dropped (or there is something else drastically wrong with the site and it doesn’t match what the seller described). Tough! As far as escrow.com/IES’s terms are concerned your agreement has no value. The seller gave you control of the site and if he wants to complete the transaction then IES is just going to release the funds to him. The contract entered into by the Buyer and Seller is a carefully constructed document designed to protect each party’s interest. IES won’t even look at that contract. They go by their own terms and conditions and it may or may not be in your favour.

To be fair, you can try raising a dispute or arguing the terms with IES, but there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed, it’s entirely up to them.

4. Many of the “experts” who recommend escrow.com are doing so because they get a commission. Escrow.com is one of the few (if not the only) escrow companies that has an affiliate program. That they are paying people to recommend them is not reason enough to shun their services. But be aware that any recommendation of their service may be driven by expectations of commission rather than a desire to help you.

5. Escow.com is regulated by an authority on another planet. Most experts agree that while the banks took a lot of liberties it was ultimately the regulators who failed in controlling the financial institutions and were responsible for the credit crunch of 2008.

But there is no regulator on this planet quite like the Commissioner in California. He sounds like a cross between Saddam Hussein, Michael Jackson and Imelda Marcos.

He’s power mad and a bit crazy. Nobody – anywhere in the world – can do this business with anyone based in California unless they pay the Californian Commissioner huge amounts of money, bow to his authority, promise to jump when he says jump and sign up to lots of nonsense. But the madness doesn’t end there. If an escrow company in Syndey or Singapore or Sierra Leone decides they can’t be bothered with some jobsworth in California, they need to be aware that he has banned anyone, anywhere in the world, from saying anything critical about him. I promise, I’m not making this up!

That’s just the start. If you read the California Financial Code (div 6, 17000-17305) there’s some pretty serious stuff in there that should dissuade anybody from buying or selling a site if the party they are dealing with is California based. But if the escrow company is registered there it’s even more serious. You will almost certainly lose should a dispute arise. In fact, if they file a court case against you in California, they don’t even need to inform you of the action. In can be all decided in your absence.

Read the full story of the California Risk here.

So even if IES is a very trustworthy company, has a strong balance sheet and great customer service, the fact that they are based in California and signed up to the California Financial Code is reason enough to go look elsewhere for your escrow needs.

Reliable escrow companies that proudly declare they are not registered in California:

Moniker:

Moniker is an ICANN Accredited Registrar and the only company with a special domain escrow account at its registrar to safely hold domains and protect both buyer and seller of domain related transactions. (not registered in California… for the moment)

iEscrow:

I-Escrow, Inc. is Licensed by the Washington Department of Financial Institutions (No. 540-EA-42257) and adheres to its strict regulations, as well as the ordinances put forth by the Revised Code of Washington.

SEDO, escroweurope, Escrow Europa (recommended by eBay) etc., are other alternatives.

Shill Bidding. Rigged Bidding. Coming to an auction near you

Posted on November 7, 2009 by ibuysites

Have you ever bid for a website or domain and had the uneasy feeling that the seller himself was bidding against you to artificially push your bidding up? You’d be surprised at how often that happens. Rigged bidding (also called shill bidding) is common in any bidding marketplace and there’s just no way you or the auction platform owners can do much about it.

Shill bidders are a clever lot. They setup new accounts on different IPs. They buy accounts. They ask friends to bid (and they reciprocate the favour when the friend has a domain or site he’s selling).

The net effect of the shill bidder’s activity is that you end up paying a higher price than if the auction was a fair competition among competing bidders. Places like Digital Point, Sitepoint and Flippa seem to make no attempt at shill control. True, they’ll ban you if you try to open another account from the same IP you currently use to sign into their services. But that’s pretty much their own defence. And, let’s face it, pretty useless. We’re talking a webmaster crowd here – people who know their way around using a proxy, people who know how to monitor their IP and are aware when the ISP changes it. If there’s extra profit to be made you can be sure people will try to make it even if the method is dishonest. Bear that in mind the next time you’re bidding – there’s a good chance there’s a shill bidder competing against you.

The latest news is that one of the biggest domain name resellers, Snapnames, has been caught with their pants down. For the last four years or so they’ve had an employee who’s been pushing prices up, causing people like you and me to overpay for our domains … and making Snapnames a huge chunk of extra profit in the bargain.

Unfortunately, many auction sites are designed so that the owner stands to gain if the auction item sells for a higher price. I point no finger at Flippa, I believe they are perfectly honest in their business and above what happened at SnapNames. But, a percentage link between sale price and earnings at the holding company – whether it’s eBay or SEDO – is always going to cause some level of suspicion.

It’s a rough world out there. Take care.

Top Five Website Selling Scams

Posted on September 11, 2009 by midascode

Top Five Website Seller Scams

You’ve seen your dream site, all the figures add up, the price looks good and the transaction is going through escrow. Nothing to worry about, right?

website scammers

STOP!

Website Selling Scams To Avoid!

Take a step back and have another look. Having experienced several
hundred transactions and dealt with virtually thousands of sellers, we’ve
learnt that what looks black and white may appear a distinct grey under the
due diligence microscope. The top scams we see by website sellers are:

1. Inflated earnings: The screenshots themselves could be faked. And,
let’s be honest, sellers can’t go giving out the logins and password to
their earning accounts. They may offer the closest alternative: access via a
screen sharing software. In theory, you both install the software and you can see
what’s on his screen. He navigates and clicks based on your phone
instructions.

But, beware, that’s not infallible. There are javascript tricks and
manipulated host files that could make you think you’re on Google’s
Adsense stats page when in fact you’re not! Even if he’s given you direct
access to his affiliate account, YPN stats or Paypal login, the
earnings may not be what they seem. The figures can be inflated in a
multitude of ways but the two primary routes are to over state what’s coming
in and to understate what’s going out. In examples, revenue could be
inclusive of money made on other sites and the cost of all the advertising
required to make that revenue could have been swept under the carpet.

2. Inflated traffic: It’s often the case that buyers see a site
they believe is under-monetised and base their value of the site on how
profitable they think they can make it using their own monetising
strategies. This usually relies substantially on their assessment of the
traffic. But how reliable are those figures?

The simpleton seller may repeatedly hit the site from his own PC, or set
up a script to do that for him. Examining the traffic stats and the IPs of
the most frequent visitors blows this trick out of the server logs. But what
if there really are millions of visitors from different IPs?

Visitors can be bought. There are numerous programs that sell millions of
“visitors” for a few dollars. However, many of them send just bots or
visitors of very low quality (perhaps by loading your page as a pop-up on
some heavy traffic sites). The wary buyer satisfies himself not just of the
quantity of traffic but also the quality. Here are some neat tips and ideas on
traffic logs and getting useful information out of them.

3. Hidden time costs: Professional businesses account properly for
all time used in the managing and running of the business. If the
owner/manager puts in some hours, the cost of his labour is deducted from
the profits. Most webmasters selling sites ignore this basic accounting rule
and as a result their profit figures are over-stated.

The principle is simple: Profit is reward for capital and risk. Salary is
the reward for time spent. You cannot arrive at a profit figure unless you
first deduct the notional cost of salaries (even if those salaries haven’t
actually been paid out). It’s factors like value of seller’s time and
depreciation that are the main reasons why companies’ final accounts are
recalculated (“adjusted”) for the purpose of a business sale.

Always recalculate the profit based on your careful estimation of the
level of skill and the hours you’d need to employ to replace the owners.
These tools and spreadsheets may be handy.

4. Fake Page Rank: Fortunately, most buyers now know how to check
for fake Page Rank. However, what they use for their investigation are “fake
PR checking tools”. They omit one of the most important checks: archive.org.
Yes, the Wayback Machine is a powerful tool when relying on the PR of a
site’s pages to decide the site’s value and, let’s face it, some of us are
influenced by Page Rank when buying sites.

How does archive.org help? It doesn’t give you PR, it doesn’t tell you
the past PR of any page. What it does show is how a site used to look in the
past. If the last cache of the site is considerably different it should ring
alarm bells. Large organisations like government bodies, quangoes,
educational institutions, companies etc., often own multiple websites.
Sometimes they forget to renew a domain registration and domainers quick on
their feet snap up these domains. The original content is promptly replaced
with some new material and it’s flogged off as a “quality site”.

Risk: Buying a site based on a dropped domain invites legal action.
There’ve been numerous cases where the previous owners claimed the domain
back and … won. But that’s not the only risk.

Update 2016 – Google Confirm Page Rank is no more!

Unfortunately some sellers are still claiming Page Rank or a variant of it!

5. Dropped domains: Dropped domains that have been quickly
re-registered by opportunistic domain vultures still show PR in the Google
toolbar. However, Google is aware that the domain was dropped and often
wipes the slate clean on both PR and backlinks – treating the site as a
completely new one. As PR updates don’t happen on a daily basis, the new
site owner may end up putting a lot of effort into his site only to find
that at the next update PR reverts to 0. Further, he usually also loses all
linkback credibility as the original links were made for the previous
content and purpose of the site.

More by this author on buying and selling businesses

Is The Internet The New Property Market?

Posted on January 14, 2009 by midascode

As someone who bought a house a few years ago and has since watched it drop in value faster than an athlete who just lost an leg, I am well aware that the property market is really struggling, and is set to continue to do so.

house market crash

So this begs the question: If property is no longer the solid investment that it used to be, could websites be the new boys in town?

There are of course, many factors at play, but I was recently looking at an apartment in a tourist area in Europe, it cost $200,000

I am told that I could rent that out and if I do it right, I could cover my mortgage.

In other words, I could break even.

Now, on the other hand, I could purchase a large entertainment website which also can be bought for $200,000

However, this site is making $7,000 profit per month.

Let’s assume the mortgage on the apartment is $700 per month, and the re-payments to finance the website are $1,000 per month, that is still a $6,000 per month advantage to the website.

I would love your opinions on this, considering the current climate, if you had to choose, would you rather invest your money into property, or into a website?

Midascode

John Cow Blog for Sale

Posted on April 10, 2008 by midascode

The time to sell has come for my beloved blog. Let me try and answer the first question that comes to mind, why?

Because I am entering an extremely busy period in my personal life. Moving from Europe to Australia soon, having to find a new place to stay for a couple of months first, before the big move, I am going to be spending most of my time moving house, filling out tons of paperwork, then shipping everything over to Aus and trying to get a new house there. With all this going on, I won’t have much time to attend to my online business, so I’m probably going to take a break from the Internet for a few months.

So my loss is your gain.

JohnCow.com is a widely known and popular MMO blog. Ever since the blog launched on the first of July 2007, it has hit the ground running and within just a few months its build up a very recognizable name within the make money online niche. It would be very easy for the new owner to continue the site, as its obviously being authored under a pseudonym. I’m not really a cow 😉

The stats:

PageRank 3
Alexa 22,100
Compete 41,020
Technorati 1696, Authority 1457
382 Posts
13,417 Comments
47,412 Backlinks (Yahoo!)
2,830 indexed pages (Google)
Average of 30K uniques per month (without social media)

I’m sure there’s more stats potential buyers would be interested in, and you can just shoot me a PM for further questions.

Now, besides the stats, there’s a lot of extras that will be added to the sale.

Looking at SEO, in a highly competitive niche like MMO, the blog currently ranks 5th place for “making money online” and 1st place for “John Chow” in Google’s SERPs.

For branding purposes, besides the .COM I’ve secured .BIZ .INFO .ORG and .US so the brand can be expanded to different business models. Think about blog consultancy via .BIZ, or a MMO forum on .ORG for example. .INFO right now has a facebook games app on it, which we will include. The .US is currently used to promote a unique wordpress theme I’m selling and has a Pagerank 5.

I’ve also got several unique creatives (header, mascot, banners and wallpapers) that were designed especially for the site. All files are available in PSD format so you can modify them as you see fit, and I will introduce the new owner to my designers to continue the relationship I have with them.

Speaking of relationships, because of the popularity and the nature of the blog, I’ve made a lot of influential friends in the business, obviously John Chow himself being one of them. I will introduce the new owner to my contacts. I get emails every day from people who are willing to setup a JV of some sort because of the blog’s status, I receive Beta invites and the occasional free stuff that companies sent me, looing to get promoted by John Cow. The new owner can obviously build on this.

We’ve currently got a massive quadcore dedicated server (details here) worth about $300 per month ($3,600 p/y), fully sponsored by our web hoster. Besides the free server, they also sponsor huge contests (XBOX Elite and a copy of GTA4 this month), and let us give away massive discounts to our readers and let us use our affiliate links for it too. This will all be included in the sale, the web hoster has agreed to leave the current agreement in tact for the new owner.

Besides all this, we are also including relevant site memberships like MyBlogLog (community of nearly 1,250 members) Feedburner account, twitter account. The non-free plugins we use like the advertising engine, WP affiliate pro and WP Auctions (with tailored design). Heck, I’ll even throw in the 30GB iPod video that’s currently listed in our WP auctions plugin 🙂

The blog is not banned anywhere (think Digg, Reddit, SU whatever) because we never really tried to play that field. So the new owner could focus on this market if they’d want increase traffic via social media.

I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff, so feel free to ask me whatever you’d like to know if you’re a serious buyer.

Revenue Details:

Private ad sales, some sponsored reviews, affiliate promotions etc. The site is currently not using adsense because I’ve been experimenting with different income streams. The new owner can obviously put up adsense or whatever. The site is not banned by Adsense.

The blog has a fully automated advertising script, so clients can buy a spot in seconds. Saves me a lot of time because I don’t have to chase up for sales.

Free sponsored dedicated server worth $300 per month. (I didn’t include this in the income).

Traffic Details:

The blog receives highly targeted traffic from other people in the MMO niche. This is one of the best niches to be in because people really do spend money on promoted items on the blog, like ebooks etc.

Organic: 20-30%

Referring sites: 50%

Direct traffic: 20%

Website For Sale – Online shop for organic skin, body and hair care For Sale

Posted on January 26, 2008 by I Buy Websites

Website For Sale – Online shop for organic skin, body and hair care For Sale

A stylish online retailer for fabulously pure skin, body and hair care that is organic, cruelty free and kind to the environment.

Purely-Natural.net – Website For Sale

What’s It All About: Purely-Natural.net – Purely-Natural.net is an Online shop for organic skin, body and hair care. The site can be fully adapted to sell any kind of product. Categories can be named and assigned to suit, all done through the CMS.

Purely Natural Online

How Long Established: Since September 2006.

Traffic: Monthly visitors over 2500

No Of Members: 300+ customer accounts

Current Revenue: £1200 to £1500

Expenses: Hosting £12.50 – Google AdWords £100

Price: In excess of £2500

Some further information:

The website and management system is run by osCommerce, an Open Source based e-commerce solution.

It features a rich set of online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved. The shop can easily be adjusted through the CMS (content management system) to sell any kind of products.

CMS features:
– User-friendly stylish design
– Permission-based access system
– Easy to catalogue products/services
– HTML E-mail feature: Each message, order confirmation email, order status change notification, newsletter etc. is in HTML
– Gift Voucher/Discount Coupons feature
– Easy to manage page contents
– SaleMaker
– Multiple images per product
– Wish List
– Attribute management
– Download Controller
– Easy import/export feature
– Create new/edit orders feature
– Meta Tag Controller/Generator
– Print order/invoice branded with store logo
– Who’s Online feature
– WYSIWYG HTML Editor for product, category, and text editing
– FAQ Desk
– News Desk (for magazine part of the website)
– Banner-ad-in-a-box
– Shop by Price filter
– Links feature
– Accept offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
– Accept online payment processing (2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net, iPayment, WorldPay etc.)
– Disable certain payment services based on a zone basis
– Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
– Free shipping based on amount and destination
– Disable certain shipping services based on a zone basis
– SSL Certificate feature – gives a website the ability to communicate securely with its web customers
– Affiliate scheme/registration. Allows for managing affiliates in the Admin panel, and setting default commission % per affiliate. Allows for managing linking materials (banners) in the Admin panel. Runs a number of sales and turnover reports per affiliate account and supports multi-tier affiliate programme

To get in touch with the owner and find out more about this website us our CONTACT US form

Even if you are not interested, feel free to leave a comment – I am sure the owner would welcome Feedback either way

Bet Bonus – Highly Profitable Gambling Portal

Posted on January 8, 2008 by midascode

We have been contacted by the owner of a popular free bets site. (BetBonus.co.uk)

We are sure that not all of our readers will have an interest in gambling related sites, but for those of you who do, this may well be worth looking into.

Bet Bonus.co.uk

Domain: betbonus.co.uk

Google Pagerank: 5

Traffic:

History Total	105474	Total Days	833
Today	38	Average per day	127
This week	167	Average per week	886
This month	167	Average per month	3799
Online Visitor/s	1	Average per hour	5.28
Busiest Day	608	Busiest Date	2007-08-05
Busiest Week	2927	Busiest Week	2007-08-05
Busiest Month	8718	Busiest Month	2006/08

Refferers

Keywords

The website appears #’1 on Yahoo for “free bets”.

Revenue Details
The website has not been touched since the summer but has still earned the following amounts over the last three months from bookmaker commissions:

December – £1,272.12

November – £1,187.99

October – £768.75

If you are interested in knowing more, contact us

Erotica Website For Sale

Posted on January 5, 2008 by I Buy Websites

Erotica Website For Sale

Midascode has been contacted recently by the owner of an independent video production company – a company that owns an erotica movie site which celebrates sexuality between couples.

Owner claims films are non-p0rny and artistic and promoted to couples.

Seller is looking to achieve something in excess of current Yearly income (Monthly income is in the region of $1000 – $1100)

Not the usual kind of site that Midascode would get involved in marketing – afterall with have a strict NO P0RN policy – but we did think perhaps some of our readership would be interested, so we are mentioning it here. (We have seen the site and can confirm it is not your usual P0RN site)

If you would like to know more Contact Us Here or email us at info@midascode.co.uk

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