For Sale: Germany's "TechCrunch"

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Robin Wauters

TechCrunch.com
Thursday, January 8, 2009; 7:02 PM

We've been getting quite a few tips about this, and German media outlets are picking up the story like crazy, so here goes: if you were ever in the market for a German blog, now would be a good time to put your money where your mouse is. Robert Basic, famous in German-speaking countries for his blog Basic Thinking, has put the site up for sale on eBay reportedly because he wants to start from scratch again.

Basic Thinking is a technology blog which has actually been dubbed the 'German TechCrunch' by some; we'd be honored but we're not sure since we haven't been following it and our German is a little rusty. Basic is really straightforward about the incoming revenue of the blog on the auction listing: it made him about ?37,000 gross from display and text link advertisements in 2008. He hasn't been actively selling advertising on the site so he's confident that it could bring in way more revenue, especially considering his status as the German ICT blog and that his Google PageRank could be brought back from 4 to the former 6 by simply removing the text link ads.

The visitor numbers for Basic Thinking aren't enormous, but considering the niche and the limited (German-speaking only) scope, they're decent enough: last month the site reportedly received 185,000 unique visitors and served 254,000 page views. The total number for 2008 was just under 2.5 million unique visitors and 3.6 million page impressions. The embedded graph shows the site's growth since it took off in 2005 (it was actually started back in 2003 but had been on hiatus for a while).

So, what are you waiting for?

Bidding closes in about six days, the current offer on the table is just over ?20,000 (Basic was hoping for something between 10k and 100k so we're curious to see where this will end).

(Image on top courtesy of Bild)