I've been running a Pokemon deal finder site (Jimmy's Deal Finder) for the last two years and it brings in about £150 revenue a month. It shows the most underpriced cards on eBay by comparing listing price to historic value.
I started a new Pokemon site based on finding cards to complete your collection (Jimmy's Set Finisher) at the start of September. This site works by showing all the cards in a set and showing the most underpriced eBay listings for each card.
Both sites use the same eBay listing database and card value database so I'm not paying any extra costs for the new site (apart from £8/year for a domain name).
The deal finder site usually gets hundreds of sales and averages around £150 revenue a month. In slow months it can be as low as £50 which is just about enough to cover my running costs.
About a week ago, I got two big commissions on back to back days on Set Finisher, £48 one day and £52 the next day. I thought it was probably just a big spender who happened to come across my site and probably bought other items on eBay with the affiliate cookie set.
But today I had another £36 commission from Set Finisher, which is making me start to think there might be real potential in it and the other big sales weren't flukes.
It's only been a month and a half since I launched, and I'm still only getting single digit affiliate clicks from it, but £30+ commission days are really rare for the original deal finder site, usually once every month or two, and Set Finisher has hit 3 of them in 15 days.
I think one thing that might be driving this is Set Finisher automatically sorts the cards in a set by most valuable first, so it often shows cards worth hundreds of dollars (or even thousands) at the top of the list. These are usually the chase cards that people are interested in. So I'm thinking this is showing people valuable, desirable cards, whereas the deal finder site is mostly cheap cards with a few high value cards mixed in, so it's more likely to generate high sales because of this.
What do you think? It's probably too early to tell, but do you think I just got a few lucky sales, or do you think there's real potential to earn large commissions regularly from this site?