kane

Well, it is kind of a long story. Basically, I had just bought a house and had paid off every cent of debt that I had at the time. So I didn't have a whole lot of cash in the bank. I contacted him and explained the situation to him and asked if he would be willing to sell it back to me. He told me to make him an offer. I said 5K. He told me the traffic the domains had was worth more than that. I told him that in a few weeks the traffic would be next to zero so it really wasn't, but I upped my offer to 7K ( I suppose I could have gotten a home equity loan or something like that to make him a huge offer, but I wanted to find out how much he wanted before doing anything, and getting that loan would take too long. By the time the loan went through the domains would be blacklisted and useless to me). He then replied that at this time he had no interest in selling the domain and that he wouldn't be making a counter offer and that he wasn't interested in any offer I was going to give him if it was anything less than 100K. That was just insane.

There is no way the traffic was worth that. I know what I made each month off of that traffic so there is no way he was making anywhere near that. All he did was redirect the traffic to an FPA that he was changing every day (this tells me it probably wasn't converting worth a damn or he would have kept the same one up for more than a day or two. The even better part was that he left the stats directory unprotected on the domains when he put them on his server. A lot of domains you can just type in www.domain.com/stats and depending on their setup and permissions you might be able to see the stats. So I saw the decline in traffic first hand. The traffic was cut in half within about seven days and withing about two weeks was down to about 15% of what it was. I had contacted every link list and tgp I was submitting to and explained the situation (this way they wouldn't blacklist me, just the domains).

He might have made a few thousand dollars running the traffic into the ground, but it couldn't have been any more than that and I would venture to guess it was probably more like a few hundred dollars. Back then there were some specific niches I was working in and his FPA's were never anything remotely close to that so people were coming to the site expecting one thing and getting nothing but an add for something else. That doesn't tend to covert very well.

So long story short, after about 2-3 weeks I probably could have bought the domains back at a low price, but then I would have had to go back and try to get them unblacklisted and that could have been a long process that may have never worked so I decided it wasn't worth the effort and just started over on some stuff.