You Stopped Publishing a News Site. Selling or Leasing the Archive

When a news site stops publishing, its archive usually keeps working. Years of reporting stay indexed, readers keep finding old stories through search, and the citations you earned from other newspapers, universities, councils and research sites keep pointing at your pages. If the site is still online and still drawing visitors, that archive can be sold or leased rather than left to decay. The questions to answer first are about rights, security and who controls the domain.

What your website is likely still worth

Content sites are priced on profit by most marketplaces: on Flippa in 2025, content sites sold for about 2.6x annual profit on average, and the same report shows content site sale volume fell about a third that year. A publication that stopped publishing and stopped earning does not fit that model well.

The archive is valued on other grounds. Suppose a regional news site covered its area for nine years, was cited by a state university’s journalism program, linked from the city council’s site and quoted by larger papers, and its local history and court reporting still bring in around 1,500 visits a month. Readers looking up an old trial or a closed factory still land on those pages. An archive like that could be leased to us under a lease-to-own agreement, which typically pays roughly $300 to $500 per month until the agreed price is paid in full, or bought in an outright sale where the asset is strong.

One thing that is not for sale: a Google News listing. Since April 2024, publishers can no longer set up Google News publications in Publisher Center, and content that follows Google’s policies is automatically eligible for consideration in Google News. There is no approval badge to transfer. Our guide to former news sites in 2026 explains what still carries value after that change.

What a buyer will check

• Indexation and traffic. Are the archive pages still in Google, and how many visits do they draw? We start from at least 500 monthly organic visits as estimated by Ahrefs, then confirm real clicks in Search Console.
• Editorial links. Citations from other publishers, universities, government and research sites are what news archives tend to have in abundance. Our guide to strong authority links helps you find yours.
• Brand. Does the masthead name still bring up the site when people search for it?
• Content rights. Can the archive pass to someone else without breaching contributor or licence terms?
• Security. Is the content management system patched, or has the site picked up injected pages or redirects?

Proof of history helps too. A short record of when the publication launched, its editors, notable stories, awards and the outlets that quoted it gives a buyer context that metrics alone cannot. If older pages have gone missing, the Wayback Machine often holds copies you can use to rebuild them, and Search Console keeps 16 months of performance data, so export it before that window rolls past the period when you were still publishing.

We do not consider sites that have been hacked and left that way, or sites with a penalty history, so a clean archive matters as much as a big one.

Three risks specific to this situation

1. Unclear rights in the archive. Staff articles usually belong to the publisher, but freelance work, syndicated wire copy and licensed photography often come with limits on who may republish them and for how long. Before any deal, review your contributor agreements and licences and make a list of content you cannot pass on. This is not legal advice; a media lawyer can tell you what your contracts allow.

2. An old CMS left unpatched. Many former news sites run on a content management system that nobody has updated since the last editor left. Out-of-date plugins are a common way sites get hacked, and a hacked archive can lose traffic and trust quickly. Update or lock down the CMS, remove unused plugins and accounts, and take a full backup.

3. Corrections and takedown requests with nobody to answer them. News archives attract requests: a person asking for an old story to be updated, a company disputing a report. If no one is responding, those can escalate. Keep a monitored contact route and a record of past corrections, because a buyer will want to know how those were handled. Subscriber lists, commenter accounts and newsletter data are personal data and stay out of the deal; ask an adviser what you may keep. This is general information, not legal advice.

What to do this month

1. Confirm who the domain is registered to, when it renews, and turn on auto-renew.
2. Update the CMS, remove old admin accounts and take a full backup of the database and media.
3. Add a short note that the publication has stopped publishing, and leave the archive online and readable.
4. List content with restricted rights (freelance, wire, licensed images) and decide what stays.
5. Export Search Console data and list your strongest citations from other publishers and institutions.

Your options

The monthly route pays a higher total than our cash offer. Keeping the archive makes sense if you plan to relaunch or want to preserve it as a public record yourself. Selling only the domain splits the name from the journalism that earned its trust, which is why we look at whole websites: see selling the domain only vs the whole website.

If you are wondering what happens to your reporting afterwards: we keep the site online and look after it, and the details depend on the site and are discussed on the call. Our methodology page lists what we evaluate first.

Closing a publication is often painful for the people who built it. The archive is the record of that work, and it is worth protecting while you decide.

What to do next

• Secure the CMS and back up the archive this week.
• Sort out content rights before talking to any buyer.
• Send us your site for a free valuation, or try our website value check for a quick first read.