Soggy Blogger

I find this news very surprising: Reuters is reporting that Intel is buying McAfee for almost $8 billion.

Let's review:

• Intel is the market leader for computer microchips, primarily CPUs
• Intel makes some other great products: networking equipment, motherboards, and lots of cool hardware
• Intel makes software too, but I've never perceived it to be a revenue source for them - they contribute to the linux kernel and released powertop as open source, though now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure they offer enterprise software for managing tons of computers, networks, and storage systems
• McAfee makes anti-virus software

I guess there could be a match, but it still surprises me. Frankly I think software like McAfee is more harmful than helpful. Sorry - I have to save that explanation for another day!

So far I've listed six websites for sale with Flippa, and now after my first auction with them has ended, I'm taking a step back to re-think my opinion of them.

My Opinion of Flippa

I knew Flippa before it was Flippa because it used to be a part of SitePoint - a website about websites. They still have a marketplace, but apparently due to the popularity of their website sales section, they spun off those auctions into a separate site: Flippa.

I'm not totally disappointed with the fact that my first website didn't sell, but I am re-thinking the cost of listing small, inexpensive sites with them. The site I listed is CyberPulpit.com, and while I value the site, I can understand why it didn't fetch the price I'd hoped because it doesn't have a ton of traffic or revenue. I'd hoped to sell it for at least $250, but the bidding only reached $30. With a listing fee of $19, plus a success fee of 5% and a minimum of $5, the least a sale can cost is $24. If I sold the site for $30, I would have taken home $6 - not really even worth the time it took to fill out their forms.

Fine. All that is well and good, caveat emptor, right? However, I'm finding the apparently relentless upsale efforts Flippa uses to try and get sellers to buy more extras - from $5 for a bold listing to $50 for a twitter post. The first offer was fine, but they keep sending these to me, and I've had enough. I even emailed their support staff letting them know that I have many sites to sell, but I'll take my sites elsewhere if they don't stop overselling me.

I was about to list another site with them (Telecom Rebith, a site about the telecommunications industry, cell phones, the internet, and wifi) when I realized that my "trust" with Flippa was reduced from a "9" to an "8" for apparently no reason. I wasn't upset because I'm not really sure that anyone even cares about their trust factors, but it was just enough that I decided there just had to be other website brokers out there and wanted to try one. A quick search turned up WebsiteBroker.com, so I gave it a shot!

My Initial Impression of WebsiteBroker

I only just listed Telecom Rebirth with Website Broker so I can't say too much about them, but there are some obvious differences from Flippa. Here's a quick comparison:

* - Flippa has an extra called "featured" that costs $29 on top of the $19 listing fee.
** - Flippa also has private sales that last up to six months.

Naturally most folks like me who like to pinch a penny or five will notice that WebsiteBroker is much cheaper. The higher price would be justified if the broker can sell the site for a higher price, but I'm not sure that Flippa can do that. After a few experiments with other brokerages, I'll find out.

So I've listed Telecom Rebirth and was a little surprised, maybe even impressed, when I learned that WebsiteBroker reviews sites before they are actively listed. This may be the same process that Flippa automates by asking would-be sellers to upload a verification file, but I like the idea that there are some people behind the service.

There are some other differences, too:

• Flippa automates the validation of Google Analytics data, WebsiteBroker asks for login information (yeah right!).
• Flippa apparently allows sellers to bundle sites and domain names in a single auction, WebsiteBroker does not. The WebsiteBroker restriction makes sense to me, and I searched Flippa's site for information about bundling restrictions but couldn't find anything. Maybe that explains their pricing structure?

Oh I just noticed that WebsiteBroker has the ability to automatically verify sites, but its not working for me. At the top of the screen I see this:

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /home/websitebroker/html/verifySite.php on line 29

Uh-oh! Here's a screenshot of the problem:

GoDaddy for Domain Sales

I also happen to own a bunch of potentially valuable domain names and I'm interested in selling those too. Both Flippa and WebsiteBroker allow the selling of domains, but being the frugal SOB that I am I was attracted to GoDaddy's low low prices. To sell a domain through GoDaddy's domain auctions, a one time fee of $4.99 is required to "join" and listings are free (don't you just LOVE that word??).

Listings are only seven days long, and if the domain name sells, GoDaddy gets a 5% cut for sales under $500, and 7% for sales over $500 (though that includes Escrow.com service).

I've joined and am currently trying to sell parti-federaliste.com. While the words are French, the domain has tons of backlinks and a pagerank of five, so I'm hoping it fetches a couple hundred dollars. Its been on the market for about a day and a half with no bids, so I'm starting to wonder if it will get some soon? Aha - actually I just noticed that UrlTrends was getting blocked by my default robots.txt file, so I just unblocked it so that potential buyers can easily get more information about the domain.

If you are interested in buying parti-federaliste.com, you can bid on it here:

Make a Bid to Buy parti-federaliste.com!

Note: One downside to selling with GoDaddy is that they hold payment funds for at least twenty days after a domain has sold.

UPDATE: I'm also using Dynadot to sell a domain and small website, but I'm not going to mention it here because actually I'm not too concerned if it sells there or not.

While the Dynadot marketplace may work for some, I'm not interested in really using it right now because the proceeds from the sale is only issued as Dynadot credits - there is no payout option.

eBay! What gives? Are you aware that the listing process on your site does not work with Google Chrome??? I kept on trying to submit my zip code, and each time it would alert me with an error insisting I enter a valid zip code. I tried again with Iceweasel (Firefox) and it worked fine.

I'm putting another website up for sale: CyberPulpit.com! This one is a short sale, only 7 days, with a low minimum bid and a low reserve.

The main selling point is the unique content, custom design, and pagerank of 3!

Check out the site here:

Cyber Pulpit

If you'd be interested in buying this site, please make a bid over at Flippa:

http://flippa.com/auctions/103210/Cyber-Pulpit-PR3-Niche-Politics-and-Technology

UPDATE: Bidding only reached $30, so I didn't sell the site. I listed it for only seven days as I wanted to witness what happens at the end of an auction as I'd imagined that most of the bidding occurs then. Like I expected, there were no bids until the auction had less than two days to go, but I guess because the site doesn't get too much traffic or revenue, the demand wasn't there. I'll hang onto the site and leverage it to support some of the other sites I own because it does have a pagerank of 3.

I've put one of my other websites, She's Creative, up for sale at flippa.com:

http://flippa.com/auctions/102683/Shes-Creative-Wordpress-Site

I just signed up for Flippa.com to try and sell some websites to make some money and I ran into a bug using Google Chrome when trying to increase my trust rating by connecting to Facebook. LinkedIn worked fine, but the "Connect" button described in the directions just didn't exist!

While I find that almost everything that works in Firefox works in Chrome and vice versa, I decided to try it in Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox). Surprise - it worked!