The true winners ? Add in the people who started auction list services, storage auction forums and blogs!
WINK !
Perhaps you were reading that traffic statistics graph I sent you upside down. We were blessed that we were able to establish our business in the beginning. We have done pretty well this year but business is definitely slowing due to a decline in interest in storage auctions. Luckily, we spotted this trend early enough to diversify and grow our advertising income.
There are very few websites in this niche that are established enough to survive this downturn and a lot of them are going under or are up for sale for a fraction of what they were once worth. Like in any industry only the strong will survive. Once the storage auction reality shows get cancelled all of these smaller websites will lose the little advertising income they were making and will close down. Even the big guys will feel the pinch though.
Storage Treasures won't fail because they have a multi-millionaire backing them but they will struggle to find a way to monetize the site, especially since they were counting on their educational videos to payoff and their credibility is now ruined thanks to Dave Hester's allegations. StorageUnitAuctionList will take a major hit because they have a massive PPC campaign that will be difficult to sustain. They will be forced to reduce their advertising which will have a snowball effect on their sales. AuctionsTX.com will be fine because we're very efficient, we're diversified and because two of the markets we operate in require people to either subscribe to us or to a newspaper at a higher cost. AuctionZip and this forum are the websites that have truly benefited the most from the popularity of storage auctions. AuctionZip will see a slight slowdown in advertising revenue but they are well diversified in other types of auctions. Since this forum was never optimized, until recently, it's not even close to reaching it's potential...were actually in a growth stage.