Starting 2011, our publishing company Socialoholic launched a large number of content websites mainly concerning humor and entertainment verticals. Most websites were social media driven with traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook & Pinterest.
A lot of our websites eventually became throwaway domains as the social media hype died down on them. We pulled off the plug and stopped editorial operations. The websites had served their purpose. We had already generated revenue and we weren’t thinking anything long term with them.
As we had previously monetized all of these websites, they had one common feature: all our throwaway domains were approved by some of the top ad networks, DSPs and RTB platforms and there was a buyer looking just for that.
The buyer was in the content arbitrage business which basically means that his core business was acquiring traffic on his content websites by the means of advertising. He would then display ads on his content websites in order to earn revenue. He was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in traffic acquisition and needed instant access to domains with top quality advertisers. As part of the agreement, no other assets including content, ad accounts or anything other than the domain was sold.
This was a perfect opportunity to sell something to someone at any price we found reasonable and we seized it. A lot of success eventually comes from being in the right network and knowing the right people at the right time. It is how we accidentally got into selling throwaway domains, and made $15,000 per piece.
We are under an NDA with the buyer and can neither disclose domain names nor his identity.
