I bought a number of side projects, its a nice way to get a validation of the market. I always like to see a number of paying customers even if it is just a few.
I understand why someone sick of a project would sell it. I don't fully understand the buyer market. Why would someone pay 20k for some car muffler site that makes 2k a year in AdWords traffic?
I bought a number of smaller projects that serve as traffic generators to bigger projects, typical freemium services that provide me regular signups on a daily basis.You can make the calc: pay a few thousands for years of free referrals.
I bought a bigger project 10K+ and that has technical issues that need to be resolved (will migrate from Node.js to PHP) but i have an existing customer base that helps understand the problem you try to fix. I am rebuilding the solution but in the same time i can experiment with pricing and traffic generation on the service i bought.. it is a de-risking strategy.
The reason why people sold in general because they don't have the marketing budgets to carry the project when its initial launch spike runs out.
EDIT : I typically pay 5x recurring revenu max or max 1K to 2K for non revenue generating sites that have interesting traffic of an audience I target Edit 2: I want to build a recurring revenue stream to supplement my consulting business
I do due Diligence myself , I have a good technical background and a good digital marketing background.
You will see that PHP (LAMP)projects are easier to sell than projects in more exotic stacks
I prefer to have all my projects in the same language -> PHP and i all move them to Google APP engine to keep maintenance to the lowest levels
It has nothing to do with performance i prefer to build on technology that I master
(Even more interesting is that I'm getting downvoted... has the hype pendulum swung that far?)
That being said there are always exceptions - my current business partner bought a side project for 10x gross profit because he had a lot of contacts in the industry that the owner didn't and was still able to make a great return when he sold a few years later.