Why You Can’t Just Sell Your Blog
Last week, Technosailor Aaron Brazell announced that he was selling his Blog via public auction on Sitepoint. The buy it now price: $30,000. One week (and much flaming around) after, the sale was called off.
Much has been learned from this experience—both by Aaron himself and outsiders who are interested in how this whole thing would go. There were a lot of questions raised, such as how the sale would affect the site’s being a member of b5media, and how this affiliation with the network exactly worked, and whether the asking price was appropriate, considering a $250 monthly revenue. Most of all, the question was about whether Technosailor would still be Technosailor if Aaron were to cede creative control to a new owner.
The answer: probably not. Technosailor is Aaron is Technosailor, as we have learned. Way back when this blog was first purchased by Splashpress Media (back then the Bloggy-dash-Network-dot-com), I wrote that blogging is all about personality. But I realize today that it’s not just about the personality that a blogger demonstrates in his writings. It’s the whole persona of the blogger that matters.
That makes it difficult to justify selling and buying a blog without any long-term plans for developing it. The blog would essentially change its “brains” and its personality when a new writer replaces the old one. And it just won’t be the same thing. So it might be a good idea to retain the existing author as a contributor, or even just invest in the blog, while keeping the author on the payroll.
So if you’re planning to sell your blog, be sure that its inherent value is in its profitability from the content, and not the author. There is a difference between a content-based blog and an author-based blog. In most cases, a blogger becomes his blog, and this leads to an author-based blog.
It’s those blogs that focus on content rather than authors that can do good in sales and auctions.
That’s unless your site has a badass domain name, of course, like sex.com and the like (if that were a blog), which fetched $18 million for the domain alone when it was sold last year. But that’s another story.
California Civil Code 2954
GREATREFICAR said this on March 18, 2007 4:47 am
hi nice site.
alex said this on April 12, 2007 8:16 pm
hi all.
robert said this on June 15, 2007 1:36 am
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How to Sell Your Blog said this on July 7, 2007 10:03 pm
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How to Sell Your Blog | Impesud Technology said this on July 8, 2007 8:39 pm
[...] “Hmmm…if a blog has value, can it be sold?” Well, a little search of the internet led me here. It’s a post about a blog that was up for auction. In the particular post I am referring to, [...]
Want to sell your blog? - deerPhD - The Psychology of hunting said this on December 6, 2007 8:45 am
Ill news comes apace ,
Carol said this on May 30, 2008 9:20 pm