Site sale multiples fell a third since 2021, and display advertising was not singled out
Display-advertising businesses sold at a median 43x SDE in 2021-22 and 29-31x in 2025-26 — a 33% fall. The control cohorts fell by almost exactly the same amount: Amazon-monetised businesses 29%, non-search businesses 31%. The price compression is market-wide. Unlike the volume collapse, it says nothing about search traffic.
- How it was measured
- Counted sold listings from the Empire Flippers public API with scripts/measure-rpm.mjs --multiples, keeping only SDE multiples so the figures are comparable, and grouped by the year the listing went live. Three cohorts: display advertising, Amazon, and businesses monetised by product, service, subscription or lead generation. Medians reported only where at least three sales exist in the year; n is shown for every cell.
- Evidence current as of
- What changed, and why
- A natural misreading of our own earlier note. We published that sales of display-advertising sites fell 93% between 2022 and 2026, and a reader could reasonably assume the price of the ones that still sold collapsed too. It did not — not by more than everything else did.
Listen — read from this page, nothing added
We published that sales of display-advertising websites fell 93% between 2022 and 2026, while Amazon FBA held steady. That is a volume finding, and it is specific to search-dependent businesses.
The obvious next question is what happened to the price. So we counted it.
Display advertising, median SDE multiple
| Year listed | Median | n |
|---|---|---|
| 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 confidence in search-traffic businesses — which is exactly what we expected to find, and exactly why it needed a control.
The control says otherwise
| Cohort | 2021 | 2023 | 2025 | Peak → recent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | 43x | 38x | 29x | −33% |
| Amazon-monetised | 42x | 36x | 30x | −29% |
| Product, service, subscription, lead-gen | 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 multiple as one that lives on it.
What that separates
Two things get conflated whenever someone says the market for content sites has fallen apart. They are different, and only one of them is about search.
Volume is specific. Display-advertising sales fell 93% while Amazon fell 81 to 60. Sellers of search-dependent businesses either could not sell or did not try, and that gap is real.
Price is not. The multiple compression happened to everybody. Whatever caused it — the cost of 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 display-ad 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. Multiples are medians over a wide spread, the cohorts are not matched on size or age or growth, and the year is the year a listing went live rather than the year it closed.
It also does not tell you whether the compression 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 confounder, tested
A multiple is the price divided by an average monthly profit, and the window that average is taken over is not fixed. The marketplace standardised onto twelve-month pricing across the decade, and content sites converged on it 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 artefact: if display looks worse partly because its pricing windows were changing, the gap is bookkeeping rather than market.
So we re-ran it on twelve-month windows only:
| Cohort | All windows | 12-month only |
|---|---|---|
| Display advertising | −33% | −35% |
| Amazon-monetised | −29% | −30% |
| Product, service, subscription | −31% | −30% |
The conclusion survives. Every cohort still falls together, and display's small excess is unchanged at three to five points — which is inside the noise of medians over 17 to 99 sales.
Grade this B. The source is primary, the counts are honest and the main confounder has been tested, but the recent years are thin, SDE multiples mix businesses of very different sizes, and a market-wide cause is inferred here rather than measured.
Tracked as MULTIPLE-COMPRESSION-MARKETWIDE. If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in place and say what changed.