(The one from 3 days ago never made the frontpage so we won't treat it as a dupe)
mmclar · 2026-04-26 22:04:54 UTC
Can you please make it (and keep it) so that friendships are symmetrical? I.e., "friend" rather than "follow". IMO that's the enshittification inflection point of Facebook.
Ferdinandpferd · 2026-04-26 22:08:03 UTC
Or at least use proper terminology for following someone with reciprocity: stalking.
hoppyhoppy2 · 2026-04-26 22:11:49 UTC
do you mean "without reciprocity"?
esafak · 2026-04-27 01:40:30 UTC
One directional. They don't follow each other.
lwhi · 2026-04-26 22:11:54 UTC
Why no android app?
pixel_popping · 2026-04-26 22:14:45 UTC
Why no website as well? Can't use it from a laptop, it's a bit strange for a social media, many don't like typing on a phone.
GaryBluto · 2026-04-26 22:16:02 UTC
Especially odd considering that Friendster began at a time when social media on phones was unheard of.
Quarrelsome · 2026-04-26 22:27:50 UTC
I remember when we considered a website that tells the user to download an app an anti-pattern (e.g. earlier versions of iMusic).
randallsquared · 2026-04-26 23:05:17 UTC
That's a great question, since the genesis of this was the domain name, which no one using the app will care about or visit. That is, the only thing that was actually needed here was the trademark, it appears.
s0a · 2026-04-26 22:15:55 UTC
why not a proper Progress Web App so it can run on any device independent of app stores? it's not as though a social app needs deep OS integration. I'm sure Claude or Codex could vibe code that in an afternoon.
axoltl · 2026-04-26 22:25:11 UTC
The central point of this app is to determine proximity of two devices. That's not possible today in a cross-platform way using web apps.
pixel_popping · 2026-04-26 22:26:38 UTC
You can with the Geolocation API.
s0a · 2026-04-26 23:13:29 UTC
PWA has access to bluetooth (BLE on all platforms) and NFC on Android
JumpCrisscross · 2026-04-26 23:34:29 UTC
> PWA has access to bluetooth (BLE on all platforms) and NFC on Android
This (EDIT: this app) is iOS only right now. And I hate the normalisation of giving websites access to Bluetooth and NFC.
chabska · 2026-04-27 00:15:12 UTC
I managed to make an ESP32-controlled RC car move by sending it commands from a webapp running on my Android phone last year. I don't believe I have telekinesis magic power, so I'd rather believe that this is not in-fact iOS only.
JumpCrisscross · 2026-04-27 00:45:27 UTC
Sorry, clarified.
moffkalast · 2026-04-26 22:18:16 UTC
Clearly targeted towards a US only audience I guess?
gpm · 2026-04-26 22:23:05 UTC
Even in the US... something like half of people have an android.
Starting a network effect product like a social network where you exclude half the social graph seems like... quite a decision.
citizenkeen · 2026-04-26 22:25:05 UTC
Worked for Facebook.
pixel_popping · 2026-04-26 22:25:44 UTC
It's likely much more than half because I don't see a guy working on his laptop and switching on his phone to be able to answer messages, I personally never use social medias on a phone, it's annoying to type.
QuantumNomad_ · 2026-04-26 23:09:38 UTC
I prefer most communication to happen from my phone. Keeps the laptop less distracting when I don’t talk with people so much on it. Except Slack on work computer. That one I keep open and use for talking with coworkers. But that’s because it’s part of the job, and also relevant for me and them to be talking about things we are working on.
moffkalast · 2026-04-27 09:50:18 UTC
I think it's more like 70% Apple in the US and Android 30%, whereas most elsewhere it's reversed.
ca98am79 · 2026-04-26 22:21:47 UTC
I plan to make one in the future. It's just me
lawgimenez · 2026-04-27 03:40:37 UTC
Would love to take a crack on this on Android
bossyTeacher · 2026-04-26 22:24:37 UTC
The main functionality to add friends is that you need to use the phones physically touching feature of iPhones. This doesn't exist in Android afaik.
The guy wants people to meet in person rather than doing social media the normie way.
For the record, the feature you describe was first introduced on Samsung phones 14 years ago - and later removed, likely after poor adoption. Because Apple "reinvented it", it's now planned to be reintroduced on Android too.
addedGone · 2026-04-26 22:12:13 UTC
We can't seem to be able to login from the website, it requires an Apple account? The UI might not be showing up properly.
altairprime · 2026-04-26 22:14:44 UTC
It’s app-only, right?
sikozu · 2026-04-26 22:52:12 UTC
iOS only unfortunately. Big shame.
altairprime · 2026-04-26 23:53:34 UTC
Not for the operators, I expect. If they flip a couple bits in the webserver I think they can lock the API down to require a device attestation, which would inhibit much of the API’s attack surface from being exploitable without a physical device that can afford to be console-banned (but I haven’t done my research to prove that yet, so grain of feasibility salt). Certainly in this day and age there is no desire to be “search engine optimized” by anyone using a social network for IRL friends, so they lose nothing by lacking a website. And there’s lots of small but nice services that are or have been iOS only (and a couple big ones that collapsed once they opened to other platforms). They’re explicitly selecting against the network effect already in favor of a nice experience, so it’s not like it matters if it grows more slowly. Are there drawbacks you see besides “requires an iOS device” that I haven’t considered?
addedGone · 2026-04-27 21:06:23 UTC
there is the fact that you just can't have your friends using it?
altairprime · 2026-04-28 19:20:55 UTC
My friends would rather not be scraped and harvested and indexed, which tends to make them uninterested in social network websites and offers a certain degree of pressure against Android as well. Yours may differ.
hateful · 2026-04-26 22:12:41 UTC
The only thing I liked when I did use Facebook was the "wall". To be able to post on a friend's wall semi- publically where their friends can see it. Most other Facebook clones have had the idea of tagging, but it wasn't the same. (E.g. Google+)
philipnee · 2026-04-26 22:13:08 UTC
thanks for bringing it back!
mjamesaustin · 2026-04-26 22:14:20 UTC
This looks exactly like what I've been looking for. I love the idea of using phone proximity as the only way to add friends.
I think it will be very important for the onboarding process to be effortless, so you should focus on that. Until you reach some kind of saturation, most people will be downloading the app because a friend wants to add them. Having a way to generate a QR download code on my phone when I "add" a friend so they can take a photo and then download it, and immediately connect us, would be huge.
Do you have any kind of development plan for new features?
collinmcnulty · 2026-04-26 23:09:53 UTC
I just signed up and it’s super fast. Download the app, put in your name, allow Bluetooth. No email, no password, nothing.
macintux · 2026-04-26 23:48:55 UTC
> allow Bluetooth
I'd have a hard time getting over my aversion to this. I automatically reject any app's attempt to find local devices, etc.
collinmcnulty · 2026-04-27 00:49:33 UTC
I can't imagine how it would be possible to detect a phone in close proximity without allowing this though
mkl · 2026-04-27 02:10:32 UTC
Accelerometer, by putting the two phones together and shaking (some app used to do this, but I can't find it with a quick search). Edit: I might have been thinking of Bump, mentioned downthread, though it's a different physical mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
Camera, and point it at their changing screen (or both at the same scene at the same moment). Not too intrusive.
GPS, but that would require location permission. Intrusive.
Audio, but that would require allowing microphone. Intrusive.
jaggederest · 2026-04-27 05:00:26 UTC
slightly OT but the technology behind Bump was genuinely mindblowing at the time. Phones didn't have NFC or anything like that, and they didn't use much accuracy in the way of location data, so they basically just had a general "city block" location, timestamp, and accelerometer readings and would invert the accelerometer reading and look for identical accel + timestamp.
We tested it one time with like 10 phones and everyone bumping each other / the wall as a control, in the same room and it nailed every actual pairing and ignored the others. The wiki has more, but lacks the subjective experience of how magic it was.
bjt · 2026-04-27 17:50:13 UTC
That's what Bump did, like 13 years ago, by sending accelerometer and GPS data up to the cloud and correlating it there.
It works in isolation and fails miserably when trying to do a big demo of it in a conference talk when attempted by dozens of people in the same room.
Suppafly · 2026-04-28 04:27:33 UTC
NFC?
mjamesaustin · 2026-04-27 00:09:45 UTC
What I was describing is a way to quickly onboard a friend who I want to friend, because chances are zero of my friends will have this app yet.
If the connect with friend interface also had a QR code for app download and could trigger a connection between our accounts upon download, that would remove enough friction that I could start recommending this to my friends on the fly.
deadbabe · 2026-04-26 22:19:57 UTC
Could you make it so you can have group chats but you can invite anyone you’ve tapped before and they can all talk together (but still not be able to talk outside the group chat)
ca98am79 · 2026-04-26 22:22:14 UTC
yes this is already included
saghm · 2026-04-26 22:26:38 UTC
> He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin.
> So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.
I don't know anything about how to project future ad revenue of a domain, but would this be likely to be valued at only $10,000? Unless I'm misremembering my limits, even if it made $4,500 next year and continued to cut in half every year after that, it would still account for $9,000 of revenue projecting indefinitely into the future, even bumping that up to something like 60% of the previous year's revenue it would already put it at more than $10,000 (although I don't know whether ad revenue tends to scale with inflation or not; my instinct is that the prices of ads probably would roughly increase with inflation over time)?
I know I'm nitpicking a bit about the title, but I can't help but actually be curious now that I thought of this.
soared · 2026-04-26 22:36:45 UTC
You can check out similar sales on flippa.com - ad revenue does not last forever, even if it’s existed for years. And revenue is very much not profit, you could create a site and get $100/day in ad revenue tomorrow but it would cost you $200 in ad spend.
eucyclos · 2026-04-27 06:44:16 UTC
What does the spend go to, besides hosting costs?
thrownthatway · 2026-04-27 08:27:00 UTC
Advertising costs, to drive traffic to your site(s).
xorcist · 2026-04-27 13:21:28 UTC
So, spam?
thrownthatway · 2026-04-27 13:35:39 UTC
Surely generating spam has a cost.
You can’t just send tens of thousands of emails via your typical email service.
jospeh554 · 2026-04-28 15:33:36 UTC
Malware goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
wongarsu · 2026-04-26 22:47:40 UTC
If you had a steady investment opportunity with 10% return (about in line with long-terms stock market returns), $9000 per year indefinitely is worth the same as $99000 now (in an idealized finance world. In the real world you can't invest $99000 and withdraw $9000 per year because withdrawals during downturns will take out too much. But it's a quick way to calculate equivalent values).
That's obviously an upper bound, because those domains won't make $9000/year forever. But valuing them at $10k if they make $9k/year is equally unsound. Not to mention the domain is worth more than its ad revenue. You could also end up selling it to a company that came up with the name and saw that the domain is available for purchase for some reasonable 4-5 figure amount (like in the example of this very article, where someone buys a domain for a five-figure amount)
Obviously there is a lot we don't know (is the $9k pure profit or are there substantial costs? How likely is the domain to sell?), but it sounds like the seller got the better end of the deal. He got more than $40k in value, in return the author got a deal he could afford
killingtime74 · 2026-04-26 22:55:00 UTC
Good analysis. if I was the author I would have just borrowed 20k in a personal loan and paid it off in three years. Of course he may be exaggerating that he gets 9K in Ad revenue per year or he knows that it's going to decline
QuantumNomad_ · 2026-04-26 23:01:02 UTC
I imagine that $9k ad revenue is a site that had an actual user base. And that the guy taking over the domain is going to just put all ads and no content, like he had on Friendster.com. And if so, the expected ad income is probably much lower.
prettyblocks · 2026-04-26 23:16:04 UTC
I believe it's 9k/year in parking revenue.
jospeh554 · 2026-04-28 15:31:51 UTC
Exactly, and the fact that friendster failed was because nobody was going onto it anymore, so there's nobody going to be hitting ads, other than bots.
The WayBack machine shows the redirect to the ad page offering the domain for sale.
What's the best network currently to put a domain to generate ad revenue?
aarreedd · 2026-04-27 07:52:01 UTC
Adsense
someonenice · 2026-04-27 08:23:15 UTC
Doesn't Adsense require website with proper Content ?
pknerd · 2026-04-27 08:39:45 UTC
Yes
technion · 2026-04-27 08:45:46 UTC
Yes this is what im confused about. They described it as a parking domain, but the old strategy of "buy a popular domain and put ads on a one pager" hasn't been something that pays substantively for a long time. Ads sales have plummeted in general but not being able to use adsense would make it worse.
wileydragonfly · 2026-04-27 02:38:25 UTC
Nobody gets 10% a year
bell-cot · 2026-04-27 10:37:37 UTC
...unless there's considerable uncertainty about future payments. Happily for the sellers of dubious assets, the world never seems to run out of people who can't resist a deal that's too good to be true.
sarchertech · 2026-04-27 11:46:05 UTC
S&P 500 average return over the last 5, 10, 50, and 100 years was higher than that.
jospeh554 · 2026-04-28 15:32:50 UTC
Last 5 Years: ~12.5%
Last 10 Years: ~14.0%
Last 50 Years: ~11-12% (reflects performance since the mid-1970s)
Last 100 Years: ~10.4%
mogrinz · 2026-04-27 13:41:21 UTC
I have a calendaring site (won't mention it here b/c I don't want to be seen as plugging it) that has been generating revenue from ads and subscriptions for 26 years now. At its peak, well over 100k/yr but now more like 15k/yr for the past 5 years. Still a very steady income b/c the site is sticky. The only expense I have is about $3k every 36/mo for VPS hosting. At this point the code base is so mature that I only do minimal user support. I've looked into selling but people only want to offer 2x annual revenue. Why would I do that when I can just hold onto it for another year? I wish more people saw the math your way.
55555 · 2026-04-27 14:24:38 UTC
The main reason this is an issue is that it's a lemon market. Many sellers claim their sites will require "no time to maintain" and that future returns will likely continue, but it's often a lie and thus you don't get the multiple that is truly justified. Even without lies, no one knows the truth of your business like you do. The unfortunate result of this -- and I've been in a similar position in the past -- is that you are incentivized to lazily run things into the ground slowly rather than find a new owner who may bring new passion.
Suppafly · 2026-04-28 04:18:06 UTC
>Many sellers claim their sites will require "no time to maintain" and that future returns will likely continue, but it's often a lie and thus you don't get the multiple that is truly justified.
This, the numbers they show are often a result of a pump that isn't sustainable. I've watched a bunch of youtube videos from people on the buying and selling side of things, and it's readily apparent that the values are temporary for most of the sites. The scam sites outnumber the legitimate long term ones and both are sold on the same platforms.
cestith · 2026-04-27 15:53:18 UTC
I would have several questions before negotiating seriously, and I could actually be in the market for such a beast.
At what multiple would you be comfortable considering selling? If revenue has dropped 85% from its peak, have you identified the cause of the drop? Has it been steady that past five years? Do you have a record of the time spent on it, or does it just feel minimal? How much of revenue is from ads vs subscriptions? Is it sticky mainly because a user can’t export things and import them to Google Calendar or something?
Is it custom software, heavily customized software, or are you basically selling the calendaring component of something like Citadel or Horde? What languages are in use? Does the buyer get just the site or full ownership of the codebase and the rights to derive new products and services from it? Does it come with the domain and trademarks?
Are you selling outright, or are you reserving some royalty for yourself?
What does the handover look like? Does the buyer just get an email with URLs and login credentials, or do you plan on familiarizing a buyer with the whole thing?
mogrinz · 2026-04-27 18:13:43 UTC
The site is localendar.com (you can reach me through the Contact Form there and I can share more financials). Short version: I started back in '99. There were no good calendaring engines back then so I had to build my own (with wicked performance btw ;)). The site is Java/SQL Server. It's sticky b/c it targeted webmasters who needed an easy-to-update calendar for their own site.
The original goal was to aggregate all these local events into a single searchable index and serve up local ads alongside. I never really got that part to take off, though I did get a very early patent for local search on the web. Since then, calendaring libs have come along which allowed many site-builder tools to offer a built-in solution.
The primary reasons for declines are 0) Not as many people build raw sites anymore; people migrate to things like Wordpress or Wix) 1) Google showing less profitable ads and 2) Webmasters w/ a popular site can remove ads via a subscription (which are drastically underpriced; some are still on a legacy $9.95/year). Everything is exportable (and importable) via iCal if desired. Buyer gets everything, w/ no residual royalties to me. I'd have to have an active role in the handover since it's all bespoke code. The buyer would need some level of Java+T-SQL since I don't want to teach coding from scratch.
I love my users and many rely heavily on the site - it's meant to be very simple to use and I tend to draw an older demographic that doesn't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles. 26+ years is a lot of time and I don't have the passion for it I used to. I had a recent health issue and my wife is concerned that she wouldn't know how to close this out gracefully if the worst ever happened.
chillfox · 2026-04-27 02:11:56 UTC
From what I can tell, The upper bound on price for any site making less than 100k a month is 24 months of revenue, but the more common is around 12 months.
The buyer takes on substantial risk because it's easy to fake the numbers, and google updates can tank the site at any time.
Also, most sites will require maintenance/upkeep to keep earning, or they can tank quick. Even if they have got evergreen content, without updates google might drop their search ranking.
julianeon · 2026-04-27 02:35:14 UTC
I see it more as 20-40 on Flippa. Where are you seeing 12x monthly revenue sales?
chillfox · 2026-04-27 03:13:44 UTC
it's been a few years since I looked into it, but the 12x-24x was the range I saw for sites that actually sold. I guess it might have changed since then.
julianeon · 2026-04-27 02:21:20 UTC
You are absolutely right and that jumped out at me. I should also point out the obvious: if people were selling online assets making $9k/year for $9k, there would be a line out the door of people lining up to buy them. If anyone here is selling an asset that makes $X a year for $X, I'll buy it! I make my money back in 12 months and everything else is profit.
So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a decent proxy for "the market." We would look at the monthly revenue: in this case, around $750/mo (which is 9k divided by 12). Then we'd do a multiple of the monthly revenue: 20 is low, 40 is normal. I would actually say 30 here, because this guy created the asset and I would bet he did it well and it's not junk. So let's say it's worth $22.5k.
So I think it would be more accurate to say, "I purchased the site in a deal through assets valued at about $42k, total."
[edit: updated the comment as I got confused about the thing being exchanged - it's a site the guy created that he transferred to make the sale]
timr · 2026-04-27 02:54:15 UTC
Yeah, but you have to scale the projections for uncertainty about the future, and exaggeration by the seller.
In particular, if someone on the internet tells me they’re making $x a month from spammy ads on a squatted domain, I immediately discount the claim substantially due to bullshit. I increase the discount rate if the person making the claim is trying to sell me said domain.
julianeon · 2026-04-27 03:13:37 UTC
True, but if the guy contacting you is the actual owner of the website you use to buy domains, his credibility increases enormously. He said this person was a customer on his platform. When that guy says "I have a website which is making 10k/year," and I already trust the domain platform he created because I use it as a customer, I believe him.
thrownthatway · 2026-04-27 08:22:49 UTC
> I believe him.
Enough to be motivated to proceed with due diligence.
Whatever any potential buyer considers that to mean for them.
timr · 2026-04-27 08:59:23 UTC
You really think the owner of the marketplace doesn’t have an incentive to convince you to make a sizable transaction?
vel0city · 2026-04-27 03:26:58 UTC
Projected revenues for this domain is at $100k this year!
How much are you trying to sell the domain for?
Uhh...about $100k.
ipaddr · 2026-04-27 12:53:10 UTC
There are tons of those offers. Carefull that 9k revenue doesn't come from $9000 of ads.
vlod · 2026-04-28 15:41:17 UTC
I'm probably being dim here, but can you elaborate a bit more. Where's the rest of the non-ad revenue coming from?
elphinstone · 2026-04-27 13:54:36 UTC
I doubt gray market sites have any kind of longterm value or predictable revenues. Who knows what kind of site it was, but to be valued so lowly the regulatory risk might be very high.
ufocia · 2026-04-27 20:38:27 UTC
To "get your money back" you would actually need to get $x+risk free interest (or maybe + inflation rate), no?
andy_ppp · 2026-04-27 09:25:35 UTC
If Friendster.com was making around $9,000 per year, this would explain why paying $30k + domains returning a similar amount would make sense?
Someone · 2026-04-27 10:39:13 UTC
They said “a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue”, not “a domain that was making about $9k/year in profits”.
Also, even if it were making about $9k/year in profits, if that comes with large costs (be it labor or dollars), it still might not be worth it. Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular. Add in uncertainty about whether that site will keep doing that, and I can see such a domain not being worth much.
fluoridation · 2026-04-27 12:08:54 UTC
>Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular.
That's not investment, that's just the cost of upkeep. It's possible you simply cannot afford to keep up with that expense rate, but the fact remains that it's net profit. With a $100k investment and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you lost $91k. With a yearly $100k cost and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you earned $9k. No matter how you slice it it's a money-printing machine. The question is much it cost you to buy the machine, not how much it costs you to run it, because you'd be a fool to turn it off.
Comments
Ask HN: How to make Friendster great? (98 points, 11 months ago, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053119
This (EDIT: this app) is iOS only right now. And I hate the normalisation of giving websites access to Bluetooth and NFC.
Starting a network effect product like a social network where you exclude half the social graph seems like... quite a decision.
The guy wants people to meet in person rather than doing social media the normie way.
For the record, the feature you describe was first introduced on Samsung phones 14 years ago - and later removed, likely after poor adoption. Because Apple "reinvented it", it's now planned to be reintroduced on Android too.
I think it will be very important for the onboarding process to be effortless, so you should focus on that. Until you reach some kind of saturation, most people will be downloading the app because a friend wants to add them. Having a way to generate a QR download code on my phone when I "add" a friend so they can take a photo and then download it, and immediately connect us, would be huge.
Do you have any kind of development plan for new features?
I'd have a hard time getting over my aversion to this. I automatically reject any app's attempt to find local devices, etc.
Camera, and point it at their changing screen (or both at the same scene at the same moment). Not too intrusive.
GPS, but that would require location permission. Intrusive.
Audio, but that would require allowing microphone. Intrusive.
We tested it one time with like 10 phones and everyone bumping each other / the wall as a control, in the same room and it nailed every actual pairing and ignored the others. The wiki has more, but lacks the subjective experience of how magic it was.
It works in isolation and fails miserably when trying to do a big demo of it in a conference talk when attempted by dozens of people in the same room.
If the connect with friend interface also had a QR code for app download and could trigger a connection between our accounts upon download, that would remove enough friction that I could start recommending this to my friends on the fly.
> So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.
I don't know anything about how to project future ad revenue of a domain, but would this be likely to be valued at only $10,000? Unless I'm misremembering my limits, even if it made $4,500 next year and continued to cut in half every year after that, it would still account for $9,000 of revenue projecting indefinitely into the future, even bumping that up to something like 60% of the previous year's revenue it would already put it at more than $10,000 (although I don't know whether ad revenue tends to scale with inflation or not; my instinct is that the prices of ads probably would roughly increase with inflation over time)?
I know I'm nitpicking a bit about the title, but I can't help but actually be curious now that I thought of this.
You can’t just send tens of thousands of emails via your typical email service.
That's obviously an upper bound, because those domains won't make $9000/year forever. But valuing them at $10k if they make $9k/year is equally unsound. Not to mention the domain is worth more than its ad revenue. You could also end up selling it to a company that came up with the name and saw that the domain is available for purchase for some reasonable 4-5 figure amount (like in the example of this very article, where someone buys a domain for a five-figure amount)
Obviously there is a lot we don't know (is the $9k pure profit or are there substantial costs? How likely is the domain to sell?), but it sounds like the seller got the better end of the deal. He got more than $40k in value, in return the author got a deal he could afford
The WayBack machine shows the redirect to the ad page offering the domain for sale.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231018214628/https://friendste...
So doesn't seem like it was serving ads anyway
This, the numbers they show are often a result of a pump that isn't sustainable. I've watched a bunch of youtube videos from people on the buying and selling side of things, and it's readily apparent that the values are temporary for most of the sites. The scam sites outnumber the legitimate long term ones and both are sold on the same platforms.
At what multiple would you be comfortable considering selling? If revenue has dropped 85% from its peak, have you identified the cause of the drop? Has it been steady that past five years? Do you have a record of the time spent on it, or does it just feel minimal? How much of revenue is from ads vs subscriptions? Is it sticky mainly because a user can’t export things and import them to Google Calendar or something?
Is it custom software, heavily customized software, or are you basically selling the calendaring component of something like Citadel or Horde? What languages are in use? Does the buyer get just the site or full ownership of the codebase and the rights to derive new products and services from it? Does it come with the domain and trademarks?
Are you selling outright, or are you reserving some royalty for yourself?
What does the handover look like? Does the buyer just get an email with URLs and login credentials, or do you plan on familiarizing a buyer with the whole thing?
The original goal was to aggregate all these local events into a single searchable index and serve up local ads alongside. I never really got that part to take off, though I did get a very early patent for local search on the web. Since then, calendaring libs have come along which allowed many site-builder tools to offer a built-in solution.
The primary reasons for declines are 0) Not as many people build raw sites anymore; people migrate to things like Wordpress or Wix) 1) Google showing less profitable ads and 2) Webmasters w/ a popular site can remove ads via a subscription (which are drastically underpriced; some are still on a legacy $9.95/year). Everything is exportable (and importable) via iCal if desired. Buyer gets everything, w/ no residual royalties to me. I'd have to have an active role in the handover since it's all bespoke code. The buyer would need some level of Java+T-SQL since I don't want to teach coding from scratch.
I love my users and many rely heavily on the site - it's meant to be very simple to use and I tend to draw an older demographic that doesn't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles. 26+ years is a lot of time and I don't have the passion for it I used to. I had a recent health issue and my wife is concerned that she wouldn't know how to close this out gracefully if the worst ever happened.
The buyer takes on substantial risk because it's easy to fake the numbers, and google updates can tank the site at any time.
Also, most sites will require maintenance/upkeep to keep earning, or they can tank quick. Even if they have got evergreen content, without updates google might drop their search ranking.
So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a decent proxy for "the market." We would look at the monthly revenue: in this case, around $750/mo (which is 9k divided by 12). Then we'd do a multiple of the monthly revenue: 20 is low, 40 is normal. I would actually say 30 here, because this guy created the asset and I would bet he did it well and it's not junk. So let's say it's worth $22.5k.
So I think it would be more accurate to say, "I purchased the site in a deal through assets valued at about $42k, total."
[edit: updated the comment as I got confused about the thing being exchanged - it's a site the guy created that he transferred to make the sale]
In particular, if someone on the internet tells me they’re making $x a month from spammy ads on a squatted domain, I immediately discount the claim substantially due to bullshit. I increase the discount rate if the person making the claim is trying to sell me said domain.
Enough to be motivated to proceed with due diligence.
Whatever any potential buyer considers that to mean for them.
How much are you trying to sell the domain for?
Uhh...about $100k.
Also, even if it were making about $9k/year in profits, if that comes with large costs (be it labor or dollars), it still might not be worth it. Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular. Add in uncertainty about whether that site will keep doing that, and I can see such a domain not being worth much.
That's not investment, that's just the cost of upkeep. It's possible you simply cannot afford to keep up with that expense rate, but the fact remains that it's net profit. With a $100k investment and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you lost $91k. With a yearly $100k cost and a yearly $9k profit, if you stop at the first year you earned $9k. No matter how you slice it it's a money-printing machine. The question is much it cost you to buy the machine, not how much it costs you to run it, because you'd be a fool to turn it off.