I wanted to share this media buying calculator I found. I've been using this to help find potential winners and judge what it might take to make a buy worth it, based on the given stats anyway. Its been useful when weeding through the juicyads listings.
http://blog.sitescout.com/2011/06/on...tor-and-guide/
For juicyads listings I would always visit the site before you buy and do an Alexa check. Some of those listings look good on paper, but in actual fact their traffic is just junk. Sites with organic traffic have always yielded the best results for me. I'm sure there are some SEO tools out there for this, but usually I would google the main terms a site was going for and see if they were highly ranked.
Thanks for the tip Green.
How much weight do you give the general appearance? I know they won't all look like 10s or anything but would you say things like broken images would be a red flag? I've seen a few that look like almost the same like someone just cranked out a few of the same template and filled it with pics only changing the title of the site.
Another thing I've seen which don't know yet how to read is sites that have all of their videos just embedded from places like redtube. Would you say this is an indicator of a site to avoid?
Hmm I try not to give any bias based on appearance, slick sites have shit traffic too. Obviously it's better to buy from sites with their own branded content/videos, as they aren't just arbitraging traffic. But it's all in all in depends on prices. Sometimes I buy some ridiculously shit traffic because it's so cheap, CRs will be very low but it still turns out profitable for all parties.