Sales of display-advertising websites fell 93% while Amazon FBA held steady
Empire Flippers sold 138 display-advertising businesses in 2022 and 9 in 2026. Amazon FBA went 81 to 60 over the same period. Every search-traffic-dependent category fell ~70-90%; every non-search category held or grew.
- How it was measured
- Counted sold listings per monetisation per year directly from the Empire Flippers public API, which is unauthenticated and documented. The non-search categories are the control group — without them this would look like a market-wide slump.
- Evidence current as of
Empire Flippers publishes its sold listings through an unauthenticated API. Counting them by monetisation and year gives a clean natural experiment: same broker, same buyer pool, same period.
| Monetisation | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | 138 | 77 | 35 | 31 | 9 |
| Affiliate | 89 | 45 | 19 | 22 | 5 |
| Amazon FBA | 81 | 50 | 46 | 62 | 60 |
Across 2022 against 2025-26: display -71%, Amazon Associates -83%, affiliate -70%. Meanwhile eCommerce +110%, subscription +100%, Amazon FBA +51%.
Every category whose input is a Google click fell. Every category with another discovery surface held or grew. That control group is what makes this decisive rather than a story about a soft market.
It is the traffic, not the rates
The obvious alternative explanation is that owners simply refuse to sell at depressed multiples. If that were it, the sites that did sell would still look healthy.
They do not. Median traffic trend of successfully-sold display sites, by sale year:
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +80% | +34.5% | +22% | -17% | -26% |
The share declining went from 22% to 70%. Multiples also fell, 44x to 27x. Both things are true: owners get less, and the assets are shrinking.
Note the selection bias runs against optimism. These are the survivors — good enough to list and to sell. Sites that failed were never listed at all, and that base rate is not observable from any source we found.
And RPM did not fall
Median RPM of display-only sold sites, by sale year: 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 niche 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 in our ledger as DISPLAY-EXIT-COLLAPSE, SEARCH-DEPENDENCY-IS-THE-LINE. If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in place and say what changed.