E4 Part 1: Chris Warburton from Flippa on Growing the Website Market

On this episode, I speak with Chris Warburton, Head of Marketing & Growth at Flippa, a peer-to-peer marketplace for digital assets, about their future product development and direction.I’ve been tracking the number of new content site listings across the market place for the Wednesday deals email for paying subscribers, and Flippa consistently has 2-3x as many content site listings that are making > $500/m. It also has over 200K buyers who have completed buyer preferences which means that the amount of views a listing can get is impressive. In this part 1, free subscribers get the first 30 minutes; paying subscribers also get part 2 in their RSS feed. To access just hit the button below.Sponsored by EzoicThis podcast is sponsored by the Ezoic platform which my main software review site runs on (literally in terms of using their nameservers) to monetize through ads, maximize site speed and gain insights from their big data analytics tool.Part 1 Show NotesNew VerificationPreviously there were issues with unethical sellers but now every buyer and seller needs to be verified, escrow.com is used and Flippa is about to launch 150 new verification data sources on top of the current Google Analytics integration. As Chris states,Our ultimate goal is to become the safest place to buy and sell a digital asset on the internet as fast as possible.The first new one has actually just been announced and it’s the integration with SEMrush. Every listing page now shows a sites’ authority score and the number of domains / keywords. Users have the ability to now buy the full report for $10.Fees & ListingsFlippa has low listing ($49) and success fees at 10% for up to $50K and 5% for $100K+. Flippa traffic levels are higher than they have ever been, they are seeing more users sign up, with 1500 new people registering some days from organic demand. Excluding domains, Flippa has 5000 new listings a month. I discover that ecommerce stores, not content sites, have the highest volume on Flippa - at the time of recording there were 463 established (not starter) Blog / Review content sites on the platform, vs 744 established ecommerce stores. Chris thinks a lot of the growth opportunity for Flippa is in content sites, from educating people that you can actually sell your website. I track the number of new and total market listings each week in my Wednesday Deals email and it is surprising to me that the number isn’t larger - this week there were 173. Part of that is because the term ‘ecommerce store’ is well known, whereas the term ‘content site’ is relatively new but is starting to be used more frequently, such as when Blake the CEO of Flippa was on the Invest Like A Boss podcast and the hosts were using it.Episode 4 Part 2In part 2 of this conversation, we talk about:* How Flippa is expanding its category range into more types of digital assets later this year* How website valuations need to get more sophisticated, and be more than simply applying a multiple to revenue. I think we need to discount future cashflow and factor in other assets such as domain names.* The different listing types on Flippa and what the best strategy is for buyers to pick up the asset at the price they want* How Flippa is seeing more interest from Micro Private Equity Funds* How listing and success fees are likely going to go down over time, as an industry Part 2 is for paying subscribers, you can access by hitting the button below.Enjoyed this episode or have any questions? You can leave a comment at the bottom of the web version of this post. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit investing.substack.com