600 Articles on Backyards, Sold for ~$250K in 3 Years: Own The Yard's Engineered Exit

JPY figures in this article are rough estimates converted at ¥150/USD.

The Sale in Numbers

Item	Figure
Sale price	About $250,000 (about ¥37.5M)
Monthly revenue	$6,000 on average
Multiple	40x monthly revenue / 3.3x annual revenue
Timeline	Started September 2018 → sold 2021 (3 years)
Content	Over 600 articles
Traffic	200,000 sessions per month
Team	Owner + 1 part-time editor + freelance writers
Sale channel	Motion Invest (packaged with another site)

The Business

Own The Yard was a content site focused on backyard recreation and maintenance — basketball hoops, lawns, pools, playground equipment. Its operator, Spencer Haws, runs the niche-site media outlet Niche Pursuits, and he built this site as a public case study for his own readers, narrating everything from launch to sale in real time.

The content combined 1,000-word informational articles with 3,000-plus-word product reviews and buying guides, with SEO as the sole acquisition channel. Revenue came from display ads and Amazon affiliate commissions.

Operating Backwards from the Exit

What sets this case apart from other blog sales is that it was designed from the start with a sale in mind.

Niche selection: entered only after confirming stable (if seasonal) search demand, ad rates, and the existence of affiliate programs
Production system: brought in outsourced writers and an editor early, building a setup where articles kept accumulating without him (i.e., eliminating founder dependence)
The sale: rode a packaged deal via Motion Invest when market multiples were favorable

Stacking 600 articles in three years was only possible because of the outsourced system, and the $6,000/month was the output of a machine, not of his own labor. That is precisely why the buyer judged it could be taken over as-is, and a healthy price of 3.3x annual revenue followed.

Lessons and Analysis

Deciding the exit before you build changes every decision. Niche selection, outsourcing, publishing the record — all of it was reverse-engineered from “a site that will sell in three years.” In contrast to Lively Table, which looks back on how it should have stripped out its personal brand, Own The Yard never let founder dependence in to begin with. The mindset is to structure the site as a financial asset from the outset, rather than build it as a hobby and try to sell it later.

The 40x-monthly / 3.3x-annual multiple is the price of transferability. Because the revenue rested on a fully transferable structure — SEO x ads x outsourced articles — it fetched a multiple near the top of the market range. Sale price equals revenue times the degree to which the buyer can reproduce it.

Building in public paid off for both traffic and the sale. The public case-study format meant an audience of Niche Pursuits readers from day one, and it meant the site’s performance data accumulated in a form third parties could verify. Like Bannerbear’s build-in-public approach, transparency lowers the cost of trust — right down to easing due diligence at sale time.

What Can and Cannot Be Copied

Reproducible: the playbook — vet a niche by search demand x ad rates x affiliate availability, scale volume through outsourcing, sell in three years — is fully documented and can be followed as a model
Limits: Haws is a veteran niche-site operator, and a first-timer would struggle to quality-control 600 articles at the same speed. Compared with 2021, buyers of content sites have also grown more cautious due to the impact of AI search