if it is truly passive why in the hell would you want to sell it?
There's passive(stock dividends) and passive(almost no ongoing maintenance), those are two entirely different things, one doesn't require any thought, one does.
The reason for selling businesses that are passive income is threefold from my point of view:
1. Without maintaining the website/business you run the risk of being overtaken by a newcomer and lose your passive income.
2. Even passive businesses take some amount of work. For example you need to file your paperwork / sales tax / taxes / everything else related to the boring side of things. Even if you have people to do those things you still need to talk to them to make sure it is getting done.
3. If you want to turn that 200k income stream into some other business with more potential you can get 200k * X where X is the multiplier that you get for selling now. you can then take the 200k * X and invest that into some new thing.
1.) Definitely. This will be a slow burn unless someone wants to blow you out of the water and totally undercut you in every way/shape/form.
2.) You are right. That was the idea of my comment, there probably isn't such a thing as passive income without buying an object(not asset) that pays a royalty/dividend, I just thought you were using the word in a way in which it isn't intended.
3.) Totally, i think you need to build the support systems around the business. People will want to buy a money machine, not a hassle. Having as much of that handled before you go to sell it will make it at least at first glance a way better investment. if they are looking at buying a business, aside from them being a competitor, they are basically saying, "You know, I don't trust TNK, and i'm really tired of buying stocks, maybe i'll sink some money here" then they look at your recipe for making money and decide if they want to buy the whole lot.
I just think if you are making 200k you can probably find someone that would be happy as hell to manage most of it and you dabble in it a few hours per week. So mathwise (rounding a week to 50) 4k a week..you can certainly find someone that wants to take some equity and try to build upon that, figure out some sort of metrics for gain aside from salary handled things(what you don't ever want to see, q/a etc) and go from there.
There's passive(stock dividends) and passive(almost no ongoing maintenance), those are two entirely different things, one doesn't require any thought, one does.