24/11/2025
To be honest, nobody in the world can step up to a mic and confidently say: “In 2025 exactly 83,472 websites were sold.” There’s simply no global registry of such deals: sites are sold across dozens of marketplaces, through brokers, and in private “hand-to-hand” deals that never become public. What we can see from open data is that the market is very much alive and growing, and we’re talking not hundreds but tens of thousands of deals a year. For context: in 2025 the web has around 1.4 billion websites, of which roughly 15% are active — about 200 million that are actually up and running. On top of that, tens of millions of new sites appear every year; for 2024 estimates are around 48.6 million new websites in a year, which is roughly 177,000 a day. Against this background, a market for buying and selling existing projects is a completely natural thing.
If we look at specific platforms where numbers are at least somewhat transparent, the scale becomes clearer. Flippa, one of the largest digital asset marketplaces, reports that since 2009 it has helped sell over 300,000 businesses, websites, and domains, with “more than 12,000 websites and online businesses” sold each year. Another heavyweight, Empire Flippers, shows more than 2,500 completed deals and over $560 million in total sales volume for online businesses. And that’s before we mention Quiet Light, Motion Invest, Investors Club, niche local brokers, and direct owner-to-owner deals. Market reviews in 2025 describe Flippa as a platform that has already passed the 300,000+ sales mark, not just listings, which underlines how big the website M&A market has become. Even if you sum up only the “visible part of the iceberg” — the big public marketplaces — you get at least tens of thousands of website and online business sales per year worldwide. The real number is clearly higher once you include all the private, off-market transactions.
And here’s the good part: these volumes mean websites have become a normal, understandable asset class — something you can buy, grow, and later sell at a profit, like real estate, only digital. The market is maturing: there are detailed guides on how to value a site, standard profit multipliers, and entire communities of investors who focus only on content sites and online businesses. For entrepreneurs, that’s great news. First, you don’t have to build everything from scratch — you can enter a niche by buying a site that already has traffic and revenue. Second, any project you successfully grow has a clear “exit”: you can sell it later for a healthy multiple. So even if the world doesn’t track every single deal in one big table, the important thing is clear: in 2025 the market for buying and selling websites is no longer a geeky side hobby, but a real, growing segment of digital investing with a lot of deals and a lot of opportunity for anyone ready to get in.
