Why sell a site that makes money?

Question

Business Informatics

There are exchanges that sell a lot of sites that generate income. Why do it? Or is it all a scam?

Answer 1

A rare site brings passive income.
The site needs to be constantly maintained. Upload new material, improve functionality, and so on.
The site generates income not because there is something on it right now, but because in the course of working on the site some rating was organized among users, among search engines. But if nothing is done, then the site can quickly fall out of the ratings and lose its audience.
Apparently the owner who promoted the site found another way to earn money, but doesn’t want to throw it into the dump - suddenly there is someone who has a desire to deal with this topic and not from scratch.
Well, yes, of course, there can be divorces.

Answer 2

There is one feature here.
You have a website that brings in a certain income that spends your energy. You think it's not worth it, so you decide to sell it.
You take traffic there, drive monetization there by spending some of your money, and put it up for sale, putting a price tag 3-4 times higher than its real value.
An inexperienced buyer looks at good performance, buys a site (it’s not yet a fact that they won’t be scammed when buying), and gets garbage at the exit.
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As a rule, it makes sense to buy a site if it occupies some fat places, but for some reason the owner hasn’t figured out how to make money on it. In all other cases, creating a site from scratch and purchasing materials of the required quality will be more profitable.

Answer 3

There are exchanges that sell a lot of sites that generate income. Why do it? Or is it all a scam?

Well, first of all, divorce in this area is common.
It is not necessary that the purchased site does not generate income at all, but, for example, the income is a couple of orders of magnitude less than promised, therefore, the purchase will never pay off. It is easy to do this, for example, according to the method described by Terras - simply by paying for an advertising company before the sale, in order to demonstrate more convincing numbers to the potential owner.
Secondly, pay attention to the amount of income from sites - the vast majority of pennies. Therefore, in order to receive any significant amount, you need to juggle a huge number of sites. This is simply a very big waste of time.
Thirdly, if the fact that the site generates income today does not at all guarantee that it will generate income tomorrow. Imagine you have a high traffic pirate movie site. The income is good. But they can cover even tomorrow. Of course, it would be profitable to sell to a stupid buyer, showing real income and asking the buyer for an amount equivalent to income for six months in advance. A stupid buyer will think that in six months the site will pay off and he will begin to cut the net profit. And this is not guaranteed.
Well Saboteur described these points
. Fourthly, the site needs to be dealt with so that it continues to generate income, and this is the time. Time is not free.
Fifth, you can find a more interesting way to make money and sell the old one to free up your time.
In any case, if we are talking about the sale of a profitable business, then it is not sold at all for an amount equivalent to a month's income, but much more expensive. So the buyer will first need to recoup the purchase (return the money borrowed), and only then receive a net income from it.
The amount of the sale depends on two factors:
PS: Of course, there are situations when a really profitable site is being sold, just the seller urgently needs money, but the number of such sellers, IMHO, is vanishingly small.