It stumps me as to how people come up with the guts to post some of the sites I see for sale, and even more so all the information (read BS) they provide to explain away what appears as a scam. The scam being a site that is sold under false pretense, most popular is the traffic source. A paid-for burst of traffic is the most common culprit - when that burst is sold as some sort of natural traffic.
You’ve gotta love this. A person selling a website states revenue and traffic data, and it looks pretty good. Turns out that if you don’t read everything carefully, you might miss the fact that the data pertains to a different site with similar characteristics. You see these kind of shananagins (sp?) all the time. “Another site I owned just like this one made $x so this should do the same.” Guess what? I might have an auction site but I sure as hell don’t expect it to perform like ebay!
A few months back I bought a country music related site. I may have wrote about the first month’s results here, I’m not sure. In anycase, the second month was suspiciously less than expected. In march the site made about $30 from adsense. During April I hired some good writers and added great content. To my surprise, the site came in at only $14 and change for April.
It goes without saying that you should have a concern if a website seller seems reluctant to provide any information required for due diligence. Some website buyers may not take this seriously.
One of my undergrad finance professors was discussing methods of analyzing corporate financial statements when he summarized one technique as spotting “the funny looking kid” in the crowd. Sometimes when looking at data, you may not know exactly what may be wrong, if anything, but you have to dig somewhere.