Own The Yard: 600 Articles in a “Backyard” Niche, Sold for About $250K in 3 Years — the Calculated Exit of a Public-Experiment Site

Yen conversions in this article use a rough $1 = ¥150.

Most articles about site sales only reveal the final number. What makes Own The Yard different is that the entire process, from launch to sale, was narrated as a “public experiment” from the very start. The operator, Spencer Haws, runs the niche-site information hub “Niche Pursuits,” and this site was his fourth public case study. The record of a site that started in September 2018 and, three years later, sold for about $250,000 at 600 articles and $6,000/month, provides a ready-made benchmark for how content sites get assembled as “financial assets.”

The numbers behind the sale

What kind of site was it?

Own The Yard was a content site specializing in “backyard recreation and maintenance” (basketball hoops, lawns, pools, play equipment) positioned as a one-stop shop for backyard-related information. Content combined 1,000-word informational articles with 3,000+ word product reviews and buying guides; acquisition ran entirely on SEO. And revenue came from two sources: display advertising and Amazon affiliate income.

Haws ran the site as a public case study for his own readers, narrating everything from launch to sale as it happened. Looking back after the sale, he said (paraphrased): “It was great to be able to show, as a real example of what’s possible with a content site, going from zero to a $250,000 exit.”

Operated backward from the exit

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

• Niche selection: entered only after confirming stable search demand (despite seasonality), decent ad rates, and available affiliate programs
• Production structure: brought in outsourced writers and an editor early, building a structure that keeps producing articles without the owner (i.e., eliminating personal dependency)
• Sale: timed the package deal through Motion Invest to land when market conditions were favorable

Reaching 600 articles’ worth of volume in three years was only possible because of the outsourced structure. The biggest line item in spending was writer fees. The $6,000/month wasn’t “compensation for the owner’s labor”. It was “the output of a system,” which is exactly why a buyer could judge it fully transferable, earning it a healthy 3.3x annual revenue price.

Getting more resolution on the $6,000/month

$6,000/month on 200,000 monthly sessions works out to about $30 of monetization per 1,000 sessions. It’s a division of labor: lower-priced 1,000-word informational articles pile up the session volume, while higher-purchase-intent 3,000+ word reviews and buying guides pick up the ad rate and affiliate conversions.

One more point on reading the multiple carefully: “3.3x annual revenue” is a multiple on top-line revenue. Convert to a profit basis after deducting costs like writer fees, and the multiple would be even higher. When comparing against the domestic Japanese site-sale rate (roughly 20 months of monthly profit), reading “40 months’ worth is double the domestic rate” without aligning revenue basis versus profit basis would be a mistake.

Breaking down why it worked, in three parts

“Decide the exit before you build” changes every decision that follows. From niche selection to outsourcing to publishing the process openly, everything was worked backward from “a site that sells in 3 years.” In contrast to Lively Table, which in hindsight said it should have stripped out its personal brand, Own The Yard never built in personal dependency to begin with. This is the mindset of assembling a financial asset from the start, not building a hobby and selling it later.

A multiple of 40x monthly / 3.3x annual is a premium for “transferability.” Because the source of revenue, SEO × ads × outsourced writing, was a fully transferable structure, it earned a multiple near the top of the market range. Sale price is set by revenue amount × (the degree to which a buyer can replicate it).

“Build while publishing openly” paid off for both acquisition and the sale. The public-case-study format meant the site had a built-in audience from day one, Niche Pursuits’ readers, and that its track record accumulated in a form third parties could verify. Just like Bannerbear’s build-in-public, transparency lowers the cost of trust, including making due diligence at sale time easier.

A footnote on the package sale

The sale went through Motion Invest as a package deal alongside a different site in the “mom culture” niche. A footnote: Haws himself is a partner at Motion Invest. This is a case with unusually high numeric transparency, but it’s also a structure where he’s selling his own site through a marketplace he’s personally involved with, worth discounting somewhat on the neutrality of the sale channel. Package deals can also carry ambiguity in how the price is allocated across individual sites, so the $250K figure is fairly treated as an “about” figure too. The buyer is undisclosed.

What’s reproducible, and what isn’t

• Reproducible: the playbook — “screen a niche for search demand × ad rate × available affiliate programs, scale volume through outsourcing, sell in 3 years” — is fully documented and reproducible as a model. The niche-screening and outsourcing-structure approach transfers directly to the Japanese-speaking market too
• Limits: Haws is a veteran niche-site operator, on his fourth case study — he had reps under his belt. A first-timer would find it hard to manage quality across 600 articles at the same pace. Also, compared to 2021, buyers of content sites have grown more cautious due to the impact of AI search, and the revenue structure here — SEO-only, dependent on ads and affiliates — is likely to be discounted more heavily than it was back then
• A gap in preconditions: the effect of “build while publishing openly” was maximized because an existing audience — Niche Pursuits — already existed. An unknown operator doing the same thing won’t get the same acquisition tailwind

Related cases

• Lively Table — a contrasting case where personal brand didn’t translate into sale value
• Career Sidekick — selling an SEO-heavy $50K/month site
• The domestic Japanese site-sale rate (roughly 20 months of monthly profit)