SitePoint Archive

Just over a year ago, Australian-based Sitepoint relaunched their domain marketplace as Flippa. The change upset many of their brokers because along with the name change came pricing changes. Today the company announced a record week of domain name sales.

From the announcement, “It’s been a huge seven days at Flippa: over $1 million worth of web property has changed hands here in the last week! It’s a new sales record! And on top of that, we’ve passed $40 million of website sales for the life of the marketplace.”

While they can’t share many of the bigger private domain sales completed on Flippa, they did list several public auctions and topping the list was a resume sample site selling for $76,000. The average sale price was just over $2,600 during the week.

Flippa charges a $19 listing fee and a 5% final value fee up to $500. Similar to eBay, they have a variety of add-ons that range in price from $5 to $50. On the “they should include this free list”, Flippa charges $50 for a tweet to their flippa Twitter account.

Yesterday the domain name sales service from Sitepoint was split and renamed as Flippa. Sitepoint members were notified of the change earlier this month and auctions were transferred to Flippa yesterday.

On the Sitepoint forum, most of the feedback has been negative so far. Of course it’s important to note that people will always speak out about any change – just see any Facebook change for a good example. Flippa charges a new ”success” fee (similar to the final value fee that eBay charges) which ranges from $10-$500 depending on the final value of the sale. This fee along with the “web 2.0 bubbly look” account for the majority of the negative comments.

The most interesting comment comes from SitePoint Co-founder Mark Harbottle who notes:

Meanwhile while you all whine and complain about the fees, the design, etc. the smart sellers are listing their sites on flippa.com and they are attracting the majority of the buyer interest. They will also get the added benefit of the PR we’re about to roll out.

So, it’s totally up to you! If you want to come across to flippa and sell your site in the professional marketplace we’re creating for serious buyers, we welcome you with open arms. If not, please do go to digitalpoint. List your site for free and see if the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies.

Pretty shocking to see Mark call his customers “whiners and complainers” and offer them to leave and go to DigitalPoint. Especially considering Mark wants them to pay an extra fee on their sales. I guess time will tell if Flippa becomes another huge success for Sitepoint like their split of 99designs has apparently become.

Update: I’ve received the following note from Mark:

I’ll stop by here Allen. Perhaps a poor choice of words, but I stand by message…

There are plenty of free alternatives to Flippa to sell low end, low quality web sites. What we’re building is a quality marketplace where over 30% of the sites listed sell, and where thousands of serious cashed-up buyers frequent daily.

Sure, we charge a slight premium to list ($19 listing fee plus 5% success fee), but we’re not the most expensive in this space — you’ll find that many of the domain name marketplaces charge 10% or more. In terms of the design, it’s a subjective thing, but we are looking at making some minor tweaks to it.

We do take comments from our customers seriously. In fact all of our customers were personally invited to our beta launch several weeks ago and were encouraged to provide feedback. A cross section of our frequent users were also invited to our private alpha several months prior. We have personally been in direct contact with many of them and implemented many changes over several months as a result of their input.

Flippa has been live for a couple of days now and so far we haven’t seen any drop off in listings whatsoever. We’ve also had many compliments from buyers saying that life is so much easier for them on Flippa. That said, we will continue to make improvements based on real customer feedback as we always do.

Found via Darren, Twitter third-party application TwitterMass has gone up for auction on Sitepoint. Readwriteweb has an initial review of the service. Basically what TwitterMass does is take your search queries and follow anyone who mentions the term in your query. For example, if I setup the queries for ”hotels in Paris” or “centernetworks”, TwitterMass will automatically follow you if you mention those terms in a tweeter message. You can select to unfollow the newly followed if they don’t return the follow in x days.

There’s a free version and a $100 version which apparently comes with bonus features like the ability to DM oprah (ok i made that up) – but there is a $100 “personal version”. TwitterMass founder Jonathan Nelson notes that since the launch of the paid version 3 days ago, they have already sold 8 units. Nelson noted in a recent interview that TwitterMass took 2 weeks to develop. The service was built using Ruby and uses oAuth to pull in the account holder’s information.

The current bid price is $13,000 and the auction notes that if the price reaches over $100,000 they will throw in their ad network as a bonus.

As a reminder, Twitter is building paid tools – something to consider if you are planning to buy/acquire a Twitter application.

We reviewed the financial news and stock quote aggregator Streetread back in August when they launched their mobile version. The company describes the service as, "Streetread automatically aggregates the latest headlines from over 20 of the leading finance sites on the web, as well as all of the stocks you choose to follow".

Yesterday Streetread went up for auction on Sitepoint. The minimum bid is $8,500 with a buy-it-now price of $10,000. The founder says they are selling due to a new project the team is working on. They claim 2,000 registered users. And they note 7,000 unique visitors a month.

Last month we reported on the startups that came out of the StartupCamp in Australia. Today I’ve learned that the six startups are now being auctions individually on the Sitepoint Marketplace. I am unsure if this was the plan from the beginning or if the developers just decided to pick up a small bit of cash quickly.

Here are the startups with links to their auctions (amounts in US$):

• ActivityHorizon – current bid $1,800
• EpicTweet – current bid $600
• MyPetsNeedLove – current bid $555
• GiveDo – current bid $1,600
• ThreeFeeds – current bid $500
• iTrafficApp – current bid $1,550

One of the biggest stories of late is how many people have died and how much destruction due to the Australian brushfires. CNN is reporting that at least 181 people dead and nearly 1000 homes destroyed in bushfires. I’ve never been to Australia but hope to visit one day. My prayers go out to all of the people affected by this tragedy.

The Sitepoint team which is based in Melbourne has put together an offer for their eBooks. They have posted a very good recap of the brushfire issue which is worth reading. To help affected families in the area, Sitepoint has created a way for you to help by purchasing a set of five eBooks of your choosing for $29.95 (normally $150). All of the proceeds from the sale will go to helping victims of the Australian brushfires.

The books include html, css, design, backend development along with business and management offerings. Share the story (using the Sitepoint link not this CN link) to your colleagues and friends and let’s try to help them reach their goal of $50,000 by February 13th.

Entrecard is a blog ad sharing network. Basically you show banners for other sites and earn credits that let you "buy’ banners on other sites. It’s pretty popular in the SEO and making money blogger realm. Last week Entrecard founder Graham Langdon posted a lengthy entry about selling the site and provided a link to an auction on Sitepoint. Two days later Langdon noted that the service was no longer for sale. Langdon apparently spoke with numerous potential buyers and decided that keeping it himself and fixing it would be a better move. TheNextWeb blog has a good overview of the entire sell/no sell transaction.

This is different than JustHackIt which went from Techcrunch to sold for pence on Sitepoint less than 24 hours later.

Today Entrecard has announced a partnership with OIOpublisher which will allow Entrecard users to pay for any type of ads through OIOpublisher. Basically this means that credits you earn on Entrecard can now be used to purchase ads on the OIOpublisher network in other sizes besides the standard blog size of 125×125 pixels. The interesting part of this new arrangement is that it requires Entrecard publishers to purchase the OIOpublisher software which is $30. So far Entrecard users aren’t thrilled with having to purchase this software to use their credits on the system.

I wonder what happened to Entrecard competitor and Techcrunch40 finalist Spottt. They publicly launched back in February but we haven’t heard anything from them since and their blog is down.