Sales of ad-funded websites fell 93% while Amazon stock businesses held steady
475 words · about 2 min
The broker Empire Flippers sold 138 display-advertising businesses in 2022 and 9 in 2026. Businesses selling stock through Amazon went from 81 to 60 over the same period. Every kind of business that depends on Google sending it people fell about 70-90%; every kind that finds its customers another way held or grew.
- How it was measured
- We counted sold listings by how each business earned and by year, straight from Empire Flippers' public data feed, which needs no login and is documented. The businesses that do not depend on search are the comparison group — without them this would look like a market-wide slump rather than something specific.
- Last checked
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Watch it plot 40s · narrated · the same figures as above
Empire Flippers is a broker: it sells websites, and it publishes its completed sales through a data feed that needs no login. Counting those sales by how each business made its money, and by year, gives a clean comparison — the same broker, the same pool of buyers, the same period, with only the kind of business changing.
| How the business earned | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | 138 | 77 | 35 | 31 | 9 |
| Commission on links | 89 | 45 | 19 | 22 | 5 |
| Selling stock through Amazon | 81 | 50 | 46 | 62 | 60 |
Comparing 2022 against 2025-26: display -71%, commission on Amazon links -83%, commission on other links -70%. Meanwhile own online shops +110%, subscriptions +100%, selling stock through Amazon +51%.
Every kind of business whose customers arrive by clicking a Google result fell. Every kind that has another way of being found held or grew. That comparison is what makes this decisive rather than a story about a soft market.
It is the traffic, not the ad rates
The obvious other explanation is that owners simply refuse to sell at today's low prices. If that were it, the sites that did sell would still look healthy.
They do not. Here is how traffic was trending at the sites that successfully sold, by the year they sold — the middle site in each case:
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +80% | +34.5% | +22% | -17% | -26% |
The share of them that were shrinking went from 22% to 70%. Prices also fell — buyers went from paying 44 months of profit to 27, which the trade writes as 44x to 27x — and that fall happened right across the market, not only to ad-funded sites. Both things are true: owners get less, and the assets are shrinking.
Note which way the bias runs. These are the survivors — good enough to list and to sell. Sites that failed were never listed at all, and how many of those there are is not visible from any source we found. So if anything this table is the optimistic view.
And what a thousand pageviews earned did not fall
Money from ads is quoted per thousand pageviews, and the trade calls that RPM. For the sites funded by display advertising alone, the middle one earned: 2021 $17.31, 2022 $15.89, 2023 $20.11, 2024 $31.47, 2025 $20.08.
The ad market is fine. The audience is gone. That is not a problem a better subject or better ad placement can fix, and it is worth being clear about which of the two is broken before spending a year on the wrong one.
Tracked as DISPLAY-EXIT-COLLAPSE, SEARCH-DEPENDENCY-IS-THE-LINE. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.