How a Side-Business Media Site With Declining Rankings Still Sold for ¥1 Million — the Negotiation Strategy of Honestly Disclosing Your Problems
A side-business media site with 2 years 3 months of operation, 328 articles, and ¥69,000 in monthly revenue closed at ¥1 million (15 months of monthly profit). Despite the unfavorable condition of declining rankings amid growing competition, honest disclosure of the problems plus post-transfer support carried it to a sale at full asking price.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
The Sale in Numbers
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Sale price | ¥1,000,000 (closed at full asking price) |
| Monthly revenue | ¥68,680 / 28,000 PV per month |
| Valuation multiple | Monthly profit × about 15 months |
| Operation | 2 years 3 months, 328 articles |
| Negotiation inquiries | 6 |
| Condition | Search rankings declining amid growing competition |
Why This Case Matters
What makes this sale interesting is that the conditions were unfavorable. A media site with declining search rankings normally gets lowballed or goes unsold. The seller, Onichan, took the contrarian route:
- Explicitly stated the problems — declining rankings and growing competition — in the listing itself
- Attached post-transfer support (handover assistance) as a condition to neutralize buyer anxiety
- Held firm at the asking price on top of that
The result: from 6 negotiation inquiries, the deal closed at the full ¥1 million asking price. The multiple — 15 months of profit — even holds its own against the same seller’s VPN site (rankings rising, 13 months).
Reading Between the Numbers
Honesty is the highest-ROI negotiation tactic in site sales. Buyers will always find the problems in due diligence. Problems disclosed upfront become “conditions already priced in,” while problems discovered later become “suspected concealment,” and price negotiations collapse. Disclosing problems is not a price-cutting factor — it is a way of defending your price through trust.
“Post-transfer support” protects hundreds of thousands of yen in price for a few tens of thousands of yen of effort. The buyer’s biggest fear is “can I actually take this over and run it?” Just as the seller of Earlyname recorded 10 handover videos, a seller’s willingness to bear the transfer cost upfront is what holds the price up.
Declining sites still have an exit. Sell before revenue hits zero, and you can recover a bit over a year’s worth of monthly profit. Given the risk of an update cutting revenue to a third, as happened to Kiguchi, “sell early once the decline begins” is a rational withdrawal strategy.
What the Two-Sale Comparison Table Shows
This site and the VPN site — two properties with different conditions, sold by the same seller at the same time — only reveal their full value side by side.
| Side-business media site (this case) | VPN site | |
|---|---|---|
| Operating period | 2 years 3 months, 328 articles | 9 months, 72 articles |
| Monthly revenue | ¥68,680 | ¥19,000 |
| Trend | Declining | Rising |
| Sale price | ¥1,000,000 (15 months) | ¥240,000 (13 months) |
| Negotiation inquiries | 6 | 4 |
The declining site closed at a higher multiple than the rising one — the opposite of the textbook. What closed the gap was a deliberate “architecture of trust”: full disclosure of problems plus post-transfer support. Site-sale pricing looks like the arithmetic of “revenue × multiple,” but in practice it is determined by the total volume of the buyer’s anxiety. Every act that reduces that anxiety — disclosure, support, well-organized documentation — comes back converted into the multiple.
Related Reading
Sources
This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.