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independence2 unconnected · 1 more author in those circles
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

high

evidence

3 claims · 3 articles · 3 receipts

window

2015-05-27 → 2023-09-08

2 builders who never spoke to each other

Exhaust the alternatives before you shut it down

A property with traffic is worth more sold, auctioned, redirected into another project or left running on advertising than replaced with a closure notice. Auctioning with no reserve lets bidders price the traffic for you, and keeping a profitable product rather than selling it leaves you an addressable audience you can cross-sell against.

The method

  1. 01

    Before you kill a site that still gets traffic, work through the alternatives first: sell it privately, auction the domain, redirect it into another project, or keep it live on ad revenue until the traffic really goes.

  2. 02

    Auction a side project you have stopped caring about on Flippa and set no reserve, letting bidders decide what the traffic is worth.

  3. 03

    Keeping a profitable product rather than selling it leaves you with a customer base you can address as an audience and cross-sell against.

What it returned

  • 400,000

    Fandom replaced every page of Futhead with a closure notice instead. Ahrefs estimated the site at roughly 400,000 monthly organic visitors, Semrush at 1 million, Similarweb at 2.1M visits, on a DR 61 domain. Glen Allsopp calls turning every URL into a closure message the last option he would pick, and notes the notice did not even include a way to contact them about buying it.

  • $805

    Sold for $805 USD after two weeks, with a late bidding war, on a project with no revenue and 21k monthly visits.

  • Among the author's reasons for not selling Storemapper at roughly three to four times profit were the blogging material, the people he met through customers, and early experiments with cross-selling partnerships

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.

More in other

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.