selling a personal blog?

I’ve just noticed adesblog.com is up for sale on flippa.com with a price tag of $23,000.

It’s one of the few blogs i’ve been following from day 1 (when i first started blogging back in 2006). So first of all, it’s a shame to see Ades leave the blogosphere…

It’s always difficult though selling a personal website / blog. It just doesn’t work… not for the buyer. It’s not exactly shocking – readers come to a blog because they want to see what ‘x’ has to say… if ‘x’ has changed to ‘y’, readers just won’t come back.

So as a buyer, it’s gonna be all down hill, unless you’re using the traffic and influence to promote some other site or product.

If i were to sell smemon.com to a mystery buyer, would you come back? If you’re a regular reader, probably not – because the whole theme and style of writing would change. It might change for the better… but it would be unlikely. If a blog sells for $23k, you can be sure it’s not just a regular joe on the street who’s bought it… it’ll be someone who believes they’ll get a return on their money.

photo credit: pheezy

You can buy someone’s diary or their time or their possessions… but you can’t buy their thoughts which is what you need if you’re to continue posting on a personal blog without losing readers… unless of course you can rebrand the blog, but that’s dificult if your name is actually in the url

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if Ades manages to sell the site and if not, what will happen to it…

On a sidenote, irish owned bigulo.com (a bebo search engine) is up for sale with a BIN of $5000. Looking at the stats provided, this is a really quality investment for someone (60k+ uniques per month). They’re getting out at the wrong time though… bebo is dying (despite what the stats might say)…

Still, with that traffic and social networking / search niche i’m sure it could be put to very good use by someone….