Dave’s Cool Little Website goes poof
Read the rest of this entry »
I went to my Cool Little Website today to check it out, and I discovered it was gone…as are all the other Dave’s Cool Little Websites out there. When you reach one, you are presented with a page that simply states…
Due to changes in technology and eBay
policy this program is no longer available.
Interesting. Changes in technology? Meaning Dave didn’t want to update his code? Or sales were finally flat enough it was time to scrap the project? And, I know eBay has been changing policies (making it more difficult to get an ePN account) but what policy is prohibiting these sites?
Anyone got any inside information? Please share! 
We too were affected by this. It’s a shame; our DCLW was being used fairly regularly for a couple years now, and then the plug was pulled without any forewarning (not even an email alert from Dave and Tim).
I’m not sure what their motivation was; it could be many things…
-Jake
I agree. There’s a lesson here.
Sell a hosted, cookie cutter, money making website for a one-time 99 dollar fee. Inundate the market with them. Eventually you will have to shut down if you don’t have some sort of generous ad-revenue, promotion, or continual upsell model. I don’t think it was a technology limitation or policy change that shut down DCLW – I think it was a bad profit model to begin with.
-Dave (and NOT that Dave).
Thanks for the heads up, Dave. I have (or had) a DCLW, too, but I hadn’t checked it for awhile, so I had no idea until just reading your post that it’s now defunct. I guess I’ll have to find something else to put on my domain.
I think it really stinks, though, that Dave and Tim didn’t notify their customers of this ahead of time.
Denise
Just to play devil’s advocate, a few ideas/observations…
* I get the feeling that over the past year or so, Tim has been taking a little off his plate (to de-stress!). Maybe he needed to drop support for DCLW as part of that.
* It’s possible that maybe they stopped selling DCLW to new customers long before they pulled the plug on the rest of us.
* I would venture to guess that a large part of their decision is because eBay/ePN requires acceptance into their affiliate program — with no guarantee. It’s actually challenging to get accepted in ePN. This makes the DCLW product much less attractive and potentially a high refund rate (via Clickbank) as well, causing headaches for Tim/Dave.
-Jake
Hi Jake;
Yes, all those things are definitely possible. I definitely agree with #3 on your list – eBay isn’t handing out affiliate accounts left and right any longer. There are definitely some hurdles to overcome nowadays. The DLCW sites didn’t really offer anything useful other than product links and a few spun articles. There wasn’t a way to make them unique or sticky, as they were boilerplate sites.
Going back to my comment above, it was a flawed business model to begin with – there was no upsell or back end sales going on once the original 99 bucks was spent.
If Tim needed to take some things off of his plate to de-stress, more power to him. We all need that once in a while.
I just checked my site today and it’s gone. I got it in 2006 and it’s been a complete waste of money.
But, the point is, he has no business to puill the plug. No time limit was staed when I gave the guy my cash,. He’s a crook and I’d like to give hime the kicking he deserves. And I’d like my money back.
@Dave –
You bought the site in 2006. You paid what, $99 for it? Not knowing the month (Let’s assume October for math’s sake), you bought it 36 months ago. So, that would be $2.75 a month. Did you not recoup ANY of that investment? If I remember correctly, I made 2 ClickBank sales off of mine. Not enough to recoup my investment. Unfortunately, this does happen. I think it was a poor model to begin with, and there was no guarantee anywhere that these sites were going to stay around forever, especially with the changes in the eBay policies. Louis Allport ran into the same issues with his video business early on.
It’s a lesson…take a second look before you part with your money for something that might not be there tomorrow.