No disagreement there. My observation has been that few of the top ranking legal sites are "new". A couple were formerly dead domains and recent buyouts. But most were big offshore promoters with established forums, databases,
SEO traffic, social followings etc.
It's generally easier buy an established site versus starting one from scratch.
If my own site had an army of content writers and triple its current advertising budget, it would be doing much better. That's what I mean by "growth potential". Buying sites that just need more "watering", read MONEY.
Recently, my site has held top 5-10 rankings for sporting event betting keywords
until 3 days before each respective event. At that point, the "news dump" begins and it drops back to top 20, getting almost no visits. There are 2 ways to remedy this:
1) Become an authority site. Good luck competing with corporate media. Organic rankings are still bought whether Google likes it or not.
2) Become a news site, tough gig for smaller operators and heavily saturated. Pray your articles make the carousel before the event begins.
CBS Sports recently had ~5 of the top 10 for Belmont Stakes betting keywords. Starting the week of the event, they rewrote the same article about 6 different times: "Belmont Stakes top picks and predictions for Win Place Show and Trifecta".
The content itself was pretty bland. It likely took the writer and editor about 90 minutes tops. They listed the odds (easy 10 minutes), a couple sentences about each horse (50 minutes for 10 horses) and had their analytics team research performance metrics (call the guys downstairs, copy+paste results 30 minutes).
Between CBS, Catena and a couple noteworthy horse racing authority sites, they owned Google when it mattered most. I'd argue the offshore affiliates are starting to get flushed whether on purpose or not.
A couple very big offshore affiliates, with sites much better than mine, were almost nowhere to be found. Really sad.