throwawayValue

It's a great feeling knowing that you've built something which is used by thousands of people, but even better when it's generating revenue to cover the costs (your time, hosting, etc). However, to put things in perspective you're really only talking about 100 visitors per day and $1 in revenue. Factoring that, I suggest focusing more on improving the site, growing it's traffic and then when it passes 500 visitors per day start focusing on revenue. If you prefer the AdSense route, make sure you've optimized your ad placements and the type of ads you're serving.

This advice is coming from someone who has a site doing roughly $5k month from AdSense via 275k+ visitors / 1.3M+ pageviews and it makes up about 30% of the site's revenue. Rest is from paid plans & affiliate marketing.

You're right - it is my responsibility to sell it and so far I've just been listening to offers and haven't countered because I wasn't interested in selling at those times. However, I now would counter all offers with a reasonable asking price and detail the reasons for that price as well as my thoughts on where the growth potential is.

I agree that iheartmemcache's response really hit it on the head and I was waiting to see if it generated any other responses. The strategy he laid out is exactly in line with what I've been thinking.

Based upon my own experience, make sure your site is responsive and place at least 2 responsive ads per page. I don't turn off ads for registered users and I've never had a user complain.

Also, find out how many of your users are blocking ads - my site is roughly 5%. However, I am aware of sites that have a younger demographic and 75-80% of their users are blocking ads.

You're exactly right - different buyers will value my business in different ways and selling to a buyer like the one you described would make no sense. At a minimum, I'd be better off keeping it on auto-pilot.

For the past 30 days the bounce rate has averaged 43% and traffic has roughly doubled.

AdSense RPM, which I assume is the same as CPM, was $4 for 2015 and for about 6 months in 2013 it jumped up to $12. Would be very nice if that happened again.

That's basically what I've been doing the past few years and the reason why I've rejected previous offers. My thought process has been, why accept $XXXk when I'll just earn it anyway within X years and I'll still have the business.

I have launched a few things during the past few years which are also generating revenue, but my latest idea will require a lot more time, focus & marketing spend to get off the ground. Also, it would be very nice to be able to pay off my mortgage & have a decent cushion in the bank.

Excellent idea - you sir/ma'am are a genius!!

You are correct - different buyers will value the business differently based upon their intentions for it. Some would be more interested in growing the SaaS side, so far all of the offers I've received are related to this, whereas others might be more interested in growing the AdSense & affiliate revenue.

Important to note, my business provides a service which will always be in demand no matter if real estate is booming or busting.

I think if I could get a 5x sale price I would take it. Best so far has been 4x and none have been below 3x.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

So far all of the offers that I've received, some from "known" companies, value the business based upon it's traffic, users, brand & future potential within the real estate industry. And surprisingly, none have shown much interest in the ad revenue.

So this is really why I'm seeking outside advice on what others think based upon the little information that I've provided. I'm really at a crossroads where I need to decide if I want to truly focus on it or sell it so I can focus on another startup that's unrelated to the real estate industry.

Great questions and for obvious reasons I don't want to be very specific about the site's niche within the real estate industry, but the service that it provides will always be in demand by the general public & industry professionals.

The intent was that the majority of revenue would come from paid users (SaaS model), but AdSense & affiliate brings in more. I could probably change that by marketing, which I've never done, and I might do just that if I decide to keep it.

I've heard of them and might contact them, but I'm not really interested in paying a broker fee unless they could get a premium price.

It took a few years of working on it evenings & weekends while I had a 9-5. During that time I always thought of my salary as VC money.

Business was created prior to 2013 and apart from a few tweaks here & there, it's pretty much on auto-pilot.