Blogs: THE Web Business in 2009

I closely monitor trends and what people do in online marketplaces, and I start seeing things 🙂

I mainly monitor Sitepoint.com Marketplace and Digitalpoint.com Sites Sales Forums to see which type of web business is hot, and which is not.

My pick of the most promising web business in 2009

The demand of content-oriented sites, such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and article directories are increasing.

My pick for the strongest web business of the year candidate in 2009 is blogs. I’ve never seen so many blogs listed on the marketplaces – some are decent earners and very popular.

However, if you look closely, the trend is hot on start-up blogs with unique designs, start-up unique blog posts – the real turnkey.

But first, let’s start with established blogs.

Established blogs

Established blogs are typically packed with a lot of original content, a loyal followers, a strong readership. And of course, they have made the owner some money.

How to value an established blog’s price tag? That really depends on the blog flipper or web investor.

I agree to the mainstream view that a blog is valued 10 to 20 times its monthly revenue. However, the deviation is quite huge – for instance, a blog that make $20 a month but has a lot of potential could have bidders place their bid over $500.

Even, some established blogs I saw listed make little or no revenue, yet they have been won more than $1000!

The things to consider in acquiring an established blog is: the number of RSS and/or newsletter subscribers, the traffic, the income, the comment-to-post ratio, the ease of blog management, etc.

Start-up blogs

Start-up blogs I saw before are mainly abandoned blogs or personal blogs that lacks traffic. They typically cost less than $100.

However, today, I saw start-up blogs that are designed better than the established ones, updated with better blog post’s quality than many blogs on the blogosphere, and are created with all the plugins and tools needed to start making money online.

The unique start up blogs often come with additional add-ons, such as forums, directories, or ebooks.

The price tags of those start-up blogs are also increasing, both in the pricing ranges and in the amount the winning bidders paid. I’ve seen this later generation of startup blogs have been won at anywhere between $200 and $500.

This new trend brings many site developers re-prioritise their projects and start focusing on building start-up blogs.

The web business to avoid in 2009

I don’t know how about you, but I recommend you to stay away from autoblogs, micro sites (that usually sells ebooks and software scripts) and web directories.

Autoblogs

Automatic updating blogs are hot, but could be not as valuable as today in 2009 due to the duplicated content penalty by the search engine and ethical issues.

Moreover, as blog readers are more and more knowledgeable, they will avoid non-unique blog content at all cost – this will affect the autoblog’s incoming traffic.

Micro sites

Micro sites are those one-page sales page of ebooks or software.

They DO produce considerable money, but in my opinion, they are usually sold after they make some money for the initial owner – and in micro sites, sales tend to decline fast, as their main characteristic is red hot in the beginning, and eventually they become ‘stale’.

Web directories

Bidding directories, link directories, and somewhere-in-between directories were hot, but not in 2009. The supply surpasses the demand, and this will decline the value of web directories. Moreover, Google is said to penalise directories for a suspect of link farming and buy-and-sell links for PageRank.

So web directories are not good web investing materials.

What to invest in 2009

Again, my pick is blogs.

I also fave web businesses that support a larger sites, such as Twitter conversation manager for Twitter, Application Add-ons for Facebook, etc.

So, what’s your choice of web business investing in 2009?

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.