This week adult webmaster portal Ynot Group announced plans to launch a marketplace for buying and selling websites and domains.
If you’re expecting a Flippa clone, you could be out of luck, as the Ynot Marketplace will exclusively feature porn related online businesses, filling a gap currently left open by T&Cs of marketplaces like Flippa and brokers who are unwilling to take these sites on for fear of what it may do to their reputation and image.
“YNOT Market continues our trend of providing valuable business services designed specifically for the companies in the adult Internet industry,” says Connor Young, President of YNOT Group LLC. “We have seen a real demand for help in buying and selling websites, and YNOT Market will address that demand and help sellers monetize their assets while providing buyers with an online marketplace where they can shop for bargains. This will be a great opportunity for buyers to expand their online portfolios.”
This could be an interesting turn of events for everyone on the mainstream side of the industry, especially as so much of the money generated online is done through porn. The adult website business model is an entirely different beast to what most of us already know, especially in an industry where even getting 50K monthly visits would probably still make you a starter site!
Adult sites are currently being traded but only in small volumes on forums like GFY (guess the abbreviation!) where valuations can vary from extremely cheap to ridiculously ambitious. Without a formal marketplace like system, it would seem adult site prices have a long way to go before being considered stable and predictable enough to place a reliable valuation on. As it stands, it looks like domain names and content have a much higher value in this industry where organic ranking and page rank don’t.
For some investors, this could be a non starter due to their own personal objections to working with adult sites. Even after just ten – fifteen minutes of my own … ‘research’ …. everything becomes a little surreal and personally, I doubt I could work in this niche day in, day out. However for some investors this could be a massive opportunity to profit from what has previously been a walled community, and possibly take some best practices back to the mainstream world where we are typically behind adult sites when it comes to grass roots marketing, monetisation and conversion.
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