A lot of people set up sites just to earn adsense revenue (Google Ads) - basically create a site around a topic, with lots of pages of good interesting content and then eventually when it is indexed by the search engines and linked to by other sites it will hopefully attract enough traffic to provide income from people clicking on the ads. Over time this would provide evidence of an earnings stream and add value to the site. (Although there is no guarantee that the site will continue to retain good search engine rankings and traffic, so buying a site like this would not be risk free). If there was new content added on a regular basis, as well as a newsletter/mailing list with a decent number of subscribers then this would 'add value' too.
Beware though of sites which are just web templates (no content) populated with affiliate links (often sold on ebay). These will usually have little, if any traffic and would be unilkely to bring you an income unless you either bought visitors via ppc (Google Adwords, Overture, etc) or added sufficient quality content and then worked on getting inbound links from other good quality, relevant sites in order get decent traffic. Might as well purchase a low cost template, a domain name and do it yourself...
You might do well and build up a site like CheatPlanet [
www.cheatplanet.com] which was bought by Future Network (UK magazine publishers) for $8.7m!! Just goes to show what is possible if you build a very popular content site which then becomes desirable to a larger company. Cheatplanet is a computer games cheats and tips site - but most of their content is created (for free) by their visitors - an interesting business model. Some interesting figures:
".............
www.cheatplanet.com attracts 6.1 million unique visitors per month, of which 40% are from outside the US. Because Cheat Planet's content is reader-generated and has a longer shelf life than news or reviews, it requires limited editorial input and therefore has operated on high profit margins. For the year ended 31 December 2004, Cheat Planet's revenues were $0.9m and pre-tax profits exceeded $0.8m........".
Of course the hard part is building that great content site which attracts such huge visitor numbers, but it shows the power of finding a niche and then becoming 'THE destination site' for that subject (dominate your niche). And the concept of your users creating most of your content is a very powerful one which can allow a site to grow much bigger with minimal work and financial input by the owner/s. This creates a 'snowball' effect where the site grows bigger almost by itself and of course the bigger it becomes, the more useful content it contains and the more visitors it attracts...
Cheat Planet was lauched 8 years ago - so you do need to think long term with this strategy.... still 8.7 million dollars works out at over $1 million a year, plus the site was making a good profit before it was sold (0.8 million in 2004).
