You ponied up 125k for that site? Or you sold it? Now that it's outed would love to hear anything you care to share regarding the ups and downs of the site.
Either way I voted. Good luck
I sold it. I talk about the sale and how buyers at that level act/negotiate in tavin's thread on flipping websites.
To be honest not many downs with this project. The biggest downer was deciding to sell it because I had made a bad contract that gave 30% of profit for life to people I borrowed a modest sum from to buy the domain name. I had paid them back 2-3 times over and tried to buy them out, but they refused to let me. There wasn't much incentive to put all my time and money in to build it further but have to give up 30%. (shout out to Daniel Warner @
http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/)
The site has gone through multiple versions. Here is my original design:
US Military Bases Worldwide - The Source for Military Base Info. I bought and replaced old content with better content maybe 3-5 times. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to buy the best content first, but I could not afford it.
The traffic built over two years almost every month was greater than the last. More content, more traffic, more links, more traffic, NY Times mentions, more traffic. Until it was getting 8k-9k visitors on week days. Then a Google update took me off the top for some big keywords like "Air Force Bases."
Traffic was cut in half, but still getting 3-4k visitors per day. Not that big of a penalty, but I was really enjoying the revenue that came with 8-9k visits.
I had a lot of pride in this site. I could talk about it to people and they would sort of have a respect for it. I could talk to friends in the military and ask them where they were stationed. They would say, "Iraq" or "California" and I would be able to guess the specific base which always sort of freaked them out.
Highlight: Getting a call from a "private contractor" at a navy base looking to use my database for some on base RFID technology. I asked a friend who works on RFID chips about it and they said they just don't work the way this contractor was talking about, so it was just a bullshit story to talk about my database. And yes, I was asked if I had secret bases in my database.
