Halloween is one of the most anticipated holidays of the year. It’s the day when you get to dress up and be whatever you want, run around to house and get stuff for free. For families with children, it may cost them up to a week’s paycheck, and for the millions of companies around the world that sell costumes, decorations and candy, it’s almost like Christmas!

As an internet marketer, Halloween is the mega start for making money in the 4th quarter of the year. If you missed out on this years Halloween spending spree, here are some figures to get you excited and ready for next year! Even though the country is in financial disaster and many people are out of jobs, the Halloween spending still keeps hitting new highs. Let’s take a look!

2011 Halloween Season

• 7 out of 10 Americans will celebrate Halloween
• 41 million Trick or Treaters in 2010
• $72.31 average spend per person (costumes, candy etc)
• Total of $6.8 billion spent on Halloween related products

- Source: CNN / US Census, National Retail Federation

2011 Popular Halloween Costumes

You can usually tell what the hot costumes will be for the year, by looking at the best selling movies of the year. In 2011, the best selling costumes were super heroes such as Captain American and Green Lantern, along side with popular celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Charlie Sheen.

Want to get a jump on next year’s Halloween costumes sales? Take a look at the new movies coming out in 2012, and start making your Halloween costume sites now! Just quickly looking at the list, you know GhostBusters, Men in Black, the Avengers and Wizard of Oz will be big costume sellers in 2012.

$310 Million Spent on Pet Costumes

As much as parents love to show of their kid’s costumes, apparently their dogs are right up there on the list. Over $310 million dollars will be spent this Halloween on pet costumes. In addition to getting pet costumes at stores like PetSmart, PetCo and Target, they are also a huge seller online!

The big seller among pet costumes, are pumpkins, hotdogs and devil dogs!

Before/After Halloween Sales

Just because today is Halloween, it doesn’t mean there isn’t any more money to be made. Many costume web sites like BuyCostumes and CostumeCraze make all of their massive profits on Halloween, but they also hold some huge discounts and sales the days and weeks right after Halloween, which many people are still buying for. These web sites are also selling costumes through out the year. Holidays and events like Christmas (Santa and Elves costumes), New Years (fun glasses, hats), Easter (Bunny Costumes) and celebrations like birthdays, graduations and bachelor parties, keep the sales coming in through out the year.

There is plenty of money to be made in the Halloween and costume market, so if you didn’t get a chance to cash in on the craze this year, make sure you are ready next year, and it’s a revenue generator that you can count on year after year!

Flippa just came out with a new set of rules and adjustments for buying and selling web sites on their marketplace. You can read the full page, which is a bit lengthy, or you can read the recap I’ve put together below.

While some people will probably be angered by the price changes, it’s really all just part of the business. For anyone who pays attention to the stock market and has been keeping an eye on NetFlix, the stock has tumbled from $300 a share to $70 a share, since they made a price adjustment to their rental/dvd membership service. I don’t think the changes at Flippa will hurt their business model in the slightest, as they have established themselves as “the player” when it comes to buying and selling web sites, and the new changes will really only effect higher end sales in the $10k+ range. Additionally, the buyers of web sites will not be affected by these changes, as they are mainly listing and feature changes.

Change to Featured Listing Pricing

One of the most attractive features on Flippa when listing a web site, is to go for the main page listing. This cost was previously $40, and now increased to $50 (a 25% increase). This can be looked at in a good and bay way… good because less people may use this feature, which means your listing will stay on the main page longer, and bad because it’s an extra $10 more.

Change to Privacy Upgrades

Outside of buying and selling web sites, Flippa is an amazing resource for information. One a web site is listed and sells, it’s on the web site forever for others to view. That is of course unless you pay an upgrade fee to have the auction listed blocked from search results, removed after the auction ends, or requires a confidentiality agreement.

Flippa has lowered the price for removing auctions after they end from the web site from $100 to $30. To take advantage of this feature, you would select the “Hide Listing from Public View” option during the upgrades process. While the decrease is nice, I think this is one of the least used upgrade features.

Change to the Success Fee Cap

Lastly, we get to the success fee cap and that’s where the majority of price changes have been made. Flippa wants to stress that they are “not changing the success fee”, but instead changing the success fee cap to $2,000, from the original $500 that was in place. When a web site sells, Flippa gets a 5% success fee, which is where they make a profit. Since more web sites are selling on Flippa for over $10,000 it’s only fitting they would put this change in place.

For example, a web site sells on Flippa for $10,000 (Flippa gets a $500 success fee). Under the old plan it didn’t matter if a web site sold for $10,000 or $1,000,000… that success fee would still be $500 for Flippa. With the new change in place, that success fee is now capped at $2,000 instead of $500. If a web site sells for $40,000 or over, you would then have a $2,000 success fee.

Let’s see how this works under a few different scenarios. (From Flippa)

1. Website sells for $80 – no change as the minimum success fee remains unchanged at $5.
2. Website sells for $8,000 – no change as the existing 5% success fee of $400 is applied
3. Website sells for $18,000 – this is beyond the previous cap and the 5% success fee of $900 is applied
4. Website sells for $80,000 – this is beyond the new cap so a success fee of $2,000 is applied (ie NOT 5%)

In the end, the price increase is fractional, especially for large web sites. I’m surprised something like this wasn’t put in place earlier, but it makes sense to establish yourself as the premier marketplace for buying and selling web sites before making any big changes. The bigger question is if Flippa will continue to make changes to their web site and if more price changes are coming.

The comments over at Flippa are going both ways, some happy and some angry. In the end, Flippa is still the best place to buy and sell web sites, and unless you are selling sites for over $10,000, nothing is really changing anyway.

If you’d like to learn how to make the most money when buying and selling web site through Flippa, be sure to check out my 140+ page book called “Flip This Web Site“, which also includes bonus videos, case studies, mini niche guides and more.

How many times have we seen companies get offer millions or even billions of dollars, then either walked away from the offer, or gladly accepted it? Time and time again we see founders and CEOs make the huge decision to risk the odds and try to grow their company to something amazing, or take the money and run. One of the best examples that comes to mind is Marc Cuban, who sold his Broadcast.com company to Yahoo in 1998 for $5.9 billion in stock. After the sale Cuban diversified his money to avoid the coming market crash, and is now the owner of the NBA team the Dallas Mavericks, and worth an estimated $2.5 billion.

That’s a great example of someone taking the money and running and everything working out for the best. All too often it never works out that well. Let’s take a look at three well known web sites, their founders and their decisions on whether they should take the money and run.

MySpace.com / News Corp

Everyone remembers MySpace, but no one dares to waste time with it today. What was once one of the top web sites on the internet, MySpace introduced the world to the importance of social networking and having “friends” online. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp company acquired MySpace for a cool $580 million dollars, which many called an early exit by the founders of MySpace. Two years later in 2007, MySpace was offered an insane $12 billion dollars in stock from Yahoo, which Murdoch then turned down. Fast forward to present day and MySpace.com was sold for a lowly $35 million to an investment group by News Corp. In the end, that’s a $580 million dollar investment, with the lost opportunity at $12 billion dollars, then a kick in the pants at the end when Rupert lost his initial investment and walked away with a sad $35 million. The founders of MySpace walked away the winners in this one!

Twitter / Google

One of these days Twitter will have a business plan and start making money, right? Well, that doesn’t seem to matter, as they are still getting offers to acquire the company. In 2010, Twitter turned down an offer from Google for $10 billion to acquire the company. Twitter is currently now valued at $8.4 billion, but the continuing problems with their business model may put a damper on their overall evaluation and future bids for the company. While Twitter continues to grow in size, so does the competition against Facebook and Google+.

Groupon / Google

Google loves going after new companies and start-ups that are gaining everyone’s attention. This time they went after the daily deals site Groupon, with a $6 billion dollar offer that was refused! (2010) Instead of jumping at the idea of being an instant billionaire, Groupon founder Andrew Mason is taking his chances with the company and looking to launch their own IPO and go public. Since the initial bid for Groupon by Google, the daily deals industry has had it’s ups and downs on the real valuation of these companies and how effective the companies using daily deals are really benefiting.

Facebook / Microsoft

The largest social network in the world is still grabbing everyone attention. Now with a valuation of nearly $50 billion dollars, and with a real business model, Facebook is still being sought after by many of the world’s largest internet companies. Microsoft DID invest in Facebook at the level of a $15 billion dollar valuation, but they were not able to acquire the company, like many have tried. Mark Zuckerberg is still in control at Facebook, while the world awaits any future take over and IPO announcements.

I’ve personally had the option to sell one of my web site for a seven figure payday, but decided not to, as I didn’t like the overall structure of the business agreement, nor the company I would be partnered with. As easily as it is for so many people to say “What an idiot, take the money!“, in so many of these situations, that’s why we are entrepreneurs. We know business and we take risks. Entreprenuer has a great article on the founder of GiftZip.com, and the thought process he went through when he decided to sell his start up.

If you owned any of the web sites above, would you have taken the money and run… or continue to build out your company and potential networth?