NyTimes has an interesting story on a guy who flipped a site for an awesome $173K, after buying it for $1800 and doing some changes. According to compete.com traffic estimates the site bird-cage.com only has 5-6k monthly visitors from US, so it’s strange that just 200 visits per day can provide such nice income. Besides the site only has 257 links in yahoo and doesn’t seem to have any decent google rankings for the top keywords.

So it really looks strange why would someone pay a healthy amount of money for a small site, without much traffic.

On the other hand it shows that development could bring nice profits and e-commerce sites are the money makers!

here is the article:

Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought bird-cage.com, an online store, for $1,800 three years ago. He simply saw a Web site that was “very, very poorly done,” and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $173,000.

Mr. Hermansen, 30, is among the latest wave of entrepreneurs who, like the day traders and real estate investors before them, are looking to make a lot of money without much effort.

They use little more than home computers and free software to buy Web sites that appeal to a small and specific niche. Then they fix up the sites with hopes of reselling them for far more than they paid.

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