I have thought about the same, but over time I've started telling myself that these people (the sellers) just want an exit (e.g. because the market is falling apart), regardless of what reason they give.

I have only looked around in guest mode/logged out and haven't paid or anything to actually speak to the seller and get a fuller picture.

Are you happy with your purchases so far? What advice can you give me as a person that has a similar plan?

There are lots of reasons to exit and yeah you can't fully trust the seller when it comes to that.

Lots of people simply like to jump from project to project so being able to exit a business is great for them. Other people are retiring or get sick. Sometimes the business plateaus and they have owned it for several years and are tired of planning more articles for that niche. Some built it recently for the purpose of selling and it has terribly quality content and will likely tank in traffic in the next 12 months.

You also can't trust the seller when they say how many hours they work or believe they account for all their expenses (which is sort of a joke for content businesses anyways because almost all the expenses are added back in when accounting for the sale price anyways).

But for the type of businesses on there it doesn't really matter what the seller says, most of it is noise.

You can get all the insight you need into a content business using Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and manually looking at it.

I built a content site from scratch for ~1 year before buying any and was looking at ones for sale during that time so by the time I went to pull the trigger I was "relatively sophisticated". Actually I only bought them in the last few months but so far so good, everything has been as expected. I'm strategically merging them into a single larger site and that is going well (one already successfully merged but waiting for ad network approval for the second)