Dataset

Months of profit paid for an online business, by kind of business, from 2,661 completed sales

What each kind of online business actually sold for, written as the number of months of profit the buyer paid — the trade calls that a multiple. Measured across 2,661 completed sales worth $704m. Covers businesses selling stock through Amazon, display advertising, affiliate, digital products, dropshipping, online shops, services, software sold by subscription (SaaS) and other subscription businesses. Brokers publish one blended range and blogs quote the brokers; the difference between kinds of business is real and a blended figure hides it — software sells at 36.5 months of profit and dropshipping at 28, a difference of a third on the same earnings. These are months, not years, which is what this broker and Flippa both use and what Acquire.com does not — so a "5x to 15x" from a source quoting years is not a competing opinion about the same thing.

• $704m of transactions
• 2,661 completed sales
• 10 business models
• 2014 to 2026

Coverage

2014-01-01 to 2026-12-31

Last measured

2026-09-01

Licence

CC BY 4.0

DOI

10.5281/zenodo.22280368

What a row is

One completed sale: what it sold for, what it earned, and the multiple that implies.

Subjects

website sales, acquisition multiples, SDE, online business valuation, ecommerce, SaaS, affiliate, dropshipping

Download the summary 2,661 rows · 8 columns · CSV · no account, no email

Read the finding this came out of What buyers pay for a website fell a third since 2021, and ad-funded sites were not singled out

How to cite this

Use it commercially, change it, build on it. The only condition is credit, and a link satisfies it.

What you should know about this data

• These are months of profit, worked out against the average MONTHLY net profit. Multiply by twelve before comparing with any source quoting years, and check which one they mean — most do not say.
• A business earning in several ways is counted once, under the first kind it matches. Display advertising is 835 sales or 748 depending on that rule.
• This is one broker’s record. It is a large one and it is public, but it is not the market.
• Kinds of business with fewer than twenty sales are not published — a middle value over fewer than that is a coin toss.

How it was measured

Completed sales from a broker’s public record, keeping only listings priced against the profit left for the owner before paying themselves — the trade calls that SDE, seller’s discretionary earnings. Listings use either that or EBITDA, a stricter measure of profit, and mixing the two moves the answer by the mix rather than by the market. A business usually carries several labels for how it earns, so each is filed under ONE kind by a stated order of preference, most specific first: Amazon, then dropshipping, online shops, SaaS, subscription, digital products, services, display, affiliate. That order changes the answer, which is why it is published.

The summary

The first 60 of 2,661 rows. The download has all of them. Free to use with credit, commercially included.

What each column means

model

The kind of business, filed by the order of preference stated below

niche

The subject the broker filed it under

listed_year

The year the business was listed for sale

sale_price_usd

What it sold for — USD

monthly_net_profit_usd

Average monthly net profit, verified before sale — USD

monthly_revenue_usd

Average monthly gross revenue, verified before sale — USD

multiple

Sale price divided by average monthly net profit — how many months of profit the buyer paid — months of profit

profit_window_months

How many months the profit average covers

← Every dataset