What buyers pay for a website fell a third since 2021, and ad-funded sites were not singled out
785 words · about 4 min
A website sells for a number of months of its profit. Sites funded by display advertising sold for 43 months of profit in 2021-22 and 29-31 in 2025-26 — a 33% fall. The comparison groups fell by almost exactly the same amount: businesses earning through Amazon 29%, businesses that do not depend on search 31%. The price fall is market-wide. Unlike the collapse in the number of sales, it says nothing about search traffic.
- How it was measured
- We counted sold listings from broker Empire Flippers' public record using scripts/measure-rpm.mjs --multiples, keeping only listings priced against the profit left for the owner before paying themselves — the trade calls that SDE, seller's discretionary earnings — so the figures compare like with like, and grouped them by the year the listing went up. Three groups: display advertising, Amazon, and businesses earning from products, services, subscriptions or passing on sales leads. A middle value is reported only where at least three sales exist in that year, and the number of sales is shown for every cell.
- Last checked
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Watch it plot 49s · narrated · the same figures as above
When a small website is sold, the price is quoted as a number of months of its profit. A site earning $2,000 a month that sells for $86,000 sold at 43 months, and the trade calls that a 43x multiple. Two sites with identical earnings can sell for very different money, and the multiple is where that difference lives.
We published that sales of display-advertising websites fell 93% between 2022 and 2026, while businesses selling stock through Amazon held steady. That is about how many changed hands, and it is specific to businesses that depend on Google sending them people.
The obvious next question is what happened to the price. So we counted it.
Display advertising: months of profit paid, middle of the year's sales
| Year listed | Middle | Sales |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 43x | 117 |
| 2022 | 43x | 135 |
| 2023 | 38x | 78 |
| 2024 | 33x | 32 |
| 2025 | 29x | 21 |
| 2026 | 31x | 6 |
A third off the peak. On its own that reads as a market losing faith in businesses that live on search traffic — which is exactly what we expected to find, and exactly why it needed something to compare against.
The comparison says otherwise
| Group | 2021 | 2023 | 2025 | Peak → recent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | 43x | 38x | 29x | −33% |
| Earning through Amazon | 42x | 36x | 30x | −29% |
| Products, services, subscriptions, sales leads | 42x | 29x | 29x | −31% |
Everything fell, by almost exactly the same amount. A business with no dependence on search traffic at all lost as much of its price as one that lives on it.
What that separates
Two things get run together whenever somebody says the market for content sites has fallen apart. They are different, and only one of them is about search.
How many sold is specific. Display-advertising sales fell 93%, while Amazon went from 81 down to 60. Owners of search-dependent businesses either could not sell or did not try, and that gap is real.
The price is not. The fall in what buyers pay happened to everybody. Whatever caused it — the cost of borrowing money is the obvious candidate over this period — it was not doing something particular to display advertising.
So the honest statement is narrower than the headline anyone would write: far fewer ad-funded businesses changed hands, and the ones that did sold at roughly the same discount as every other kind of small online business.
What this does not tell you
It does not tell you what a specific site is worth. These are middle values over a wide spread, the three groups are not matched for size or age or growth, and the year is the year a listing went up rather than the year it closed.
It also does not tell you whether the fall is over. The 2026 display figure is 31x on six sales — the direction is up, and six sales is not a trend. Do not read it as a recovery; read it as an unusable cell that we are showing rather than hiding.
One thing that could have faked this, tested
The profit a multiple is calculated against is an average over some past window, and the length of that window is not fixed. The marketplace moved towards pricing on twelve months over the decade, and content sites moved later than Amazon ones — 24-29% of display listings in 2022-23 were still priced on a shorter window, against 5-8% of Amazon ones.
That is a real way this finding could have been an accident of bookkeeping: if display looks worse partly because the way it was priced was changing, the gap is paperwork rather than market.
So we ran it again on twelve-month windows only:
| Group | All windows | 12-month only |
|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | −33% | −35% |
| Earning through Amazon | −29% | −30% |
| Products, services, subscriptions | −31% | −30% |
The conclusion survives. Every group still falls together, and display's small excess is unchanged at three to five points — which is inside the wobble you would expect from middle values over 17 to 99 sales.
Grade this B. The source is the original record, the counts are honest, and the main alternative explanation has been tested — but the recent years are thin, an SDE multiple mixes businesses of very different sizes, and a market-wide cause is inferred here rather than measured.
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