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I don’t recall anyone writing about this, but the topic is interesting to me.
In short—small steps are needed on the path to a big result.
You shouldn’t immediately take on the burden of a large team, loans, investor money, and tons of obligations if you’re not entirely sure you can pull it off.
Created 1 site. Looked at it. Digged around in it, built some links, saw how it goes. You don’t need to create 5 at once and dump a bunch of money in if you haven’t grasped the whole process yet.
Modesco and Its Website Empire in the RuNet
Denis bought a vast number of websites using investor capital. There were times back in 2016 and 2017 when websites shot to the top like hotcakes, and were bought at huge multiples. Zen helped bring websites from negative returns up to break-even for investors. Denis openly shares his results, for which huge thanks to him. Here is the video: https://youtu.be/F6Bqm5_eV1M?t=785
Imagine having 2 offices, a team of people, everyone working, creating content, lots of content, and the result for the investor is near zero.
I have no criticism, let me clarify immediately so you understand me correctly, I just want to say that we don’t control everything. Filters are introduced in Google and Yandex, content is produced on a massive scale, everyone churns it out like crazy. Competition grows, which means the pie is split among all participants.
Here is an example of one of Denis’s websites in Google:
The question is: who controls and handles analytics on why the site dropped?
That’s a good question. This is my personal opinion, but you really need strong analytics nowadays to withstand Google updates without dropping.
After that, Modesco found its niche: complex services that a solo operator cannot manage, where a team is required. As a result, Telderi, Unitpay, and keys.so were acquired, and Denis is successfully developing in this direction.
All content websites were sold; the story with content sites came to an end.
I feel like I wouldn’t have pulled off what Denis did, honestly.
$350,000 for a Content Site Empire in English/Western Markets
Here is the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/l1wcb1/thats_all_folks/
The guy took a large-scale approach to building websites.
About a year ago, I decided to invest in building a network of high-quality content websites across various verticals. I hired about a dozen high-end writers with experience in each vertical, hired a full-time editor to polish every article before publishing, a full-time SEO manager to constantly optimize articles, a full-time web developer to continuously A/B test various website designs, an entire back-office process to manage high-quality content… and dreamed of industry dominance. I invested over $350k into building this network, but it never took off.
The entire network:
- microbrewery.com
- cuttingcalories.com
- fossilfuel.com
- raterush.com
- purpleflower.com
- felonies.org
- muscletheory.com
- horsebreed.com
- traderbuzz.com
- hostile.com
- wellcenter.com
- fumbled.com
Overall, 350 thousand dollars was invested here. I don’t know if this is true or not, but let’s take a look at the site parameters
By the article count it also looks plausible; Screaming Frog is still running. The website is very slow and takes a long time to crawl.
It shows 538 articles for this site.
Let’s open any of the articles and take a look.
How to trade crypto: https://raterush.com/how-to-trade-cryptocurrency/
On the surface, it looks like an ordinary outreach article created solely to place links. Nothing remarkable. I’m not going to read a wall of text, and I doubt anyone else will.
Going back to the beginning: I decided to invest in building a network of high-quality content websites… I hired about a dozen high-end writers with experience in each vertical
Look at the article and you will understand everything yourself.
We enter the query into Ahrefs
And the rating of those websites at the top:
Check out the links yourself; there’s nothing remarkable there.
Maybe this is all fake, I don’t know, but the site is very basic, and pushing such articles to the top takes a really serious amount of money.
Other sites are similar—the same template, design, layout.
I even hired a dedicated (expensive) full-time developer to start rewriting a CMS tailored for Snerk’s workflow in Golang, with extremely optimized post-rendering built for high frontend traffic and organized script management on the backend.
In short, everything done the serious way.
How to Do It Differently?
Now imagine if he had taken 1 site, populated it with 100 articles, and evaluated it—a small step. No need to hire top-tier specialists or a person for continuous A/B testing.
Just one website. Just Kaizen)
Someone replied to him in the comments exactly as I think:
>> I didn’t start small and slow because I have the funds to invest in projects,
That was your mistake.
You don’t start small because you lack funds. You start small because you must validate first. In professional marketing, you test first and then scale up.
And don’t forget that if someone buys expensive domains, it doesn’t mean they are smart just because they have a lot of money and know what they are doing. That’s not always the case:
hostile.com 8,250 USD
microbrewery.com 15,000 USD
wellcenter.com 3,750 USD
fumbled.com 4,525 USD
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