CSSMania is for sale over at SitePoint, if you’re unfamiliar with the site, it’s a CSS gallery with a blog basically.

The Bin is set at $500,000, but the site’s only making $10k a month.

Sure the site is popular, and it’s got great traffic, but that buy price is 50 months revenue…

The site costs money to run, servers, marketing, and staff. Even if you ran it yourself, it’s a fulltime job, your own wages would easily be $5k a month + server and marketing, we’ll assume $2k a month.

After those simple expenses, you’re only bringing in a $3k ROI every month, that’s 166 months before you get your $500k back, over 13 years.

Not only would you have to expand the revenue from the site somehow, but you’d have to really take on a lot of risk, anything more than 5 years to pay off your investment in a dot com is a huge risk, the industry changes daily and 5 years is a long time, let alone 13.

CSS sites only became popular a few years ago, what’s to say there won’t be something new in 2 years that’ll kill that market? I’m sure it’ll still bring in revenue, but the $10k+ a month you were expecting? Maybe not.

Not to mention that the market is saturated with other CSS sites that are all pushing in on the traffic that you have to the site, and if you don’t update the blog correctly you could start turning away traffic. The visitors are expecting a certain standard of blog posts and sites in the gallery, if you don’t have an eye for it you could end up hurting the site more than anything.

Realistically, $200k is what I think it should BIN for, I’d never pay more than 2 years revenue for a site, typically I try for no more than 2 years profit, I think most sites are fair priced at 1 – 1.5 years profit.

The internet changes so fast, your site could be hot this year, cold the next.