If the website was getting 100,000, how was it abandoned? Just not being developed further? Why were people coming to the site? And why would the owner sell for 500$.
These are genuine questions - I've very interested in this approach. Congrats on how well it turned out for you.
In this particular case, it was abandoned by its owner, but not by its users.
It wasn't in development at all, it was just a simple install of open source software.
Further, the owner didn't seem to know how to monetize it, and was losing money paying the server bill for it.
I was, obviously very surprised and pleased to get it for such a price though.
Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?
One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. http://dir.yahoo.com/
It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.
Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.
sitepoint.com has a marketplace. Lots of crap in there but you may find a blog or site that's relevant with decent traffic or keyword rankings in your niche. Anyone else have a link similar to sitepoint?
The best $500 I ever spent was on purchasing ircatwork.com which at the time had a default cgi::irc install on it. It did however have traffic - 100,000 visitors a month. I just emailed the owner, and managed to bag a bargain. Then just directed the traffic at Mibbit.com. Instant, cheap traffic looking for a good web based IRC client. I couldn't have asked for more.
A year on, and it now serves 1.5m visitors a month.