Revenue proof

Before we do a deeper dive into a website’s current financials, we should first determine if what’s being reported is even legitimate! If you find that a website’s revenue reports are fake or altered in any way, run the other way. It doesn’t matter how good a website looks — fake revenue reports are signs of a very dishonest seller who’s likely faking other aspects. But how can you tell if revenue reports are legitimate?

First of all, you need to see actual screenshots or screencasts of revenue dashboards. If a website owner just shows you a word document or spreadsheet with supposed earnings, that’s not going to fly. Something like that can be made up in 15 seconds.

If a listing has revenue reports like this, just request actual photo proof. Sometimes website owners may not be tech-savvy and didn’t think to provide proof like that.

Second of all, in the revenue source proof, there needs to be tags, codes, or names that tie the reports to the actual website in question. Anybody can screen-grab an Adsense report that doesn’t belong to them.

For example, Amazon Affiliate revenue dashboards display a tracking ID that you should be able to cross-reference with a website’s affiliate links.

An Ezoic monetization dashboard displays the names of websites pretty clearly as well.

If you’re using a website broker, many of them do extensive verification when it comes to revenue. So, if you’re buying a website on EmpireFlippers for example, you can usually infer that any revenue reports on the website listing are legitimate.

However, revenue reports on marketplaces like Flippa can still be false. Static images are very easy to fake, either through Photoshop or through using inspect element. Look how easy it is for me to change the revenue for one of my websites.

To combat this, once you get to talking to a website owner, I almost always ask for a screencast video of their revenue reports where the owner has to scroll and refresh the screen. This makes it almost impossible to doctor, and any inspect element trickery would get deleted on the refresh.

Once you’re able to verify that revenue reports are legitimate, then you can move on to actually looking at the revenue numbers, the fun part!