I'm bringing Card Value back from the dead (maybe)

By Colin Landforce · 2026-10-15

In 2021 I had a random idea. My developer built it overnight. It got to about $15k a month, then went off a cliff overnight.

It's called Card Value. As of yesterday it's live again on a brand new build, and I'm giving it 30 days to show me some life.

The problem

I was deep in basketball cards. Buying, flipping, checking prices all day on eBay.

Every card starts with the same question: what's it actually worth? eBay has the answer, but you have to dig for it. Search the exact card. Year, brand, player, card number. Scroll down to the filters, check Completed and Sold, sort by Ended Recently. Then average it out in your head. Then do it again for the next card.

So I asked my developer for one search box that skips all that. He built it overnight.

The first $1,000

There's no subscription and no ads. Every result links out to eBay with an affiliate tag. Somebody buys the card, eBay kicks me a cut.

Here are the first two months, Feb 1 to Mar 28, 2021:

3,001 clicks
$52,853.32 in sales
63 transactions
$1,006.32 in earnings
$0.36 per click

eBay Partner Network report: 3,001 clicks, $52,853.32 in sales, $1,006.32 earned — $52k of other people's cardboard.

A thousand bucks for scratching my own itch. I tweeted about it like I'd won the Powerball.

The peak

Then search found it. It turns out a ton of people Google " rookie card value." Match Attax, World Cup stickers, Pokémon, all of it. The site answered those questions with real sold prices, so traffic went up and to the right.

At the peak it did about 16,000 users a day, a million users in the stretch on that chart. It was all affiliate money, around $15k a month at the top. Beautiful.

The cliff

Then it fell off overnight. This wasn't a slow bleed. It went from around 15,000 users a day to a few thousand in about a week, then faded to almost nothing.

Analytics chart: daily users climb to about 16K, then drop off a cliff — Black diamond run.

I didn't fight it. It's been sitting there ever since with basically dead content on it.

The weird part

It never fully died. It's still getting hundreds of clicks a month from ChatGPT. AI answers keep citing a site that nobody's been updating.

That's a signal. Or I'm talking myself into it. Probably both.

The rebuild

I had some tokens to burn. I gave Claude all the history: old analytics, old search data, every URL that used to rank. Then I told it to rebuild the thing, fire up the APIs, and add real content.

Here's what's live at cardvalue.io now:

Card value pages written the way people actually search. "Match attax cards value." " rookie card value."
Live eBay listings on every page, refreshed daily
Raw vs PSA 10 prices, the most valuable cards in each set, rookie card pages by player
704 pages at launch. More go out in batches, and only if Google accepts the first round.

cardvalue.io homepage: What's your card worth? — My Little Pony made the nav. I don't make the rules, the search data does.

To be honest, the old site ran on sold prices. The new one shows live asking prices for now. If it shows any life, sold data comes back.

The deal

It gets 30 days. I wrote the kill criteria down before launch so I can't weasel out of them later:

Keep building: 300+ real visits a day, steady affiliate earnings
Kill it: under 120 visits a day, $0 earnings

I'll check it again in a month and report back. In the meantime, go see what your cards are worth.

Peace!
Colin Landforce