A $33 Million Website
Rosanne Lim
Usually, when we hear about a site selling for $100,000 or even $50,000, we are astonished and wish we can earn that much as well. So I was flabbergasted to find out that this website sold for $33 Million last May 7, 2007. At first I thought it was a joke until I saw the press release from the New York Times that explains in detail how, why, and where the ConsumerSearch.com site was acquired.
Typically, when you imagine a website worth $33 million, you imagine something unique, eye-catching, and use the latest cutting-edge technology. But looking at ConsumerSearch.com, it looks as if it is the usual “Adsense” website. Also, it looks as if their reviews are borrowed from someplace else. It is hard to imaging how the site can be worth that much until you look into its stats.
The site is basically getting 1.7 million hits per month which is astonishing when you consider that it has no real information on it. It just goes to show that even a simple website like this can generate tons of money. ConsumerSearch.com has been around for 7 years at the time when About.com acquired it.
So the question is does it look like it would take a great deal of effort to build a site like ConsumerSearch.com? Well, do as they do and hire people to write everything for you. They pay writers $350 per category and when you multiply this by 330 (the number of categories in their website), their content expenses will be worth $115,500. Even if you sell the site for a tenth of the $33 million, you will definitely come out ahead.
Building a site like ConsumerSearch.com takes a lot of ingenuity though and it is quite apparent that their domain name helped a lot in giving them the credibility they need.
Posted on: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 12:07 pm 
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