Quick... whats a good price to pay for this forum...

Been speaking with a friend of mine about a forum he started a while back but has no time to run now. It has since gone stale... but owning a forum in the same niche, I can fairly easily get traffic there again...

Threads: 1,611 Posts: 12,830 Members: 1,274 Active Members: 76

$0 revenue.

Thinking of a good deal to propose that would be a win win, either buy outright, or take it over and pay a royalty over time.

 

Based around the stats, I'd offer $30 to $200 max. There isn't much revenue so you'd be buying it for the content. I'm sure once you place ads on the site, you can easily make the money back especially if you double the stats and traffic.

 

Does it have any active members that return everyday and make posts? I'd offer up to $300, and possibly more if it had a custom design. But I'm assuming it's a quality forum that you're interested in, and it's hard to evaluate the price of a forum without knowing the URL.

 

In all seriousness, the forum is worth $200 tops, however to me, the content and existing member database is worth it. It is VB... however would be switching to xenforo or most likely IPB.

I may just be emotionally attached to it, because it is in a niche where I rock, and I know I can make it work and end up being a multi $x,xxx a month site by applying same treatment as my existing forum.

Whats a VB4 license go for?

 

not much really. 80-100?

 

0?

If he's really a friend, he should give it to you for free before he closes it...

 

He wants $2k, considering he spent money for VB licenses twice... from 3.8 up to 4.x

ois vai.

 

Not worth it. Pass.

 

Agreed.

 

12,00 post, I'd say it's work about 100 bucks but it would really depend on the quality of the post, if there are any active users..

 

Agreed, too. Skip vB4, and get xenForo.

I bought CODForums when it was only 563 Threads, 1,969 Posts, and 2,264 Members. Guess how much for?




















$1,101

 

Forum has been around 4 years... and as long as traffic is there will be able to monetize it really well.


I am getting access as admin and to Google analytics to see. In the meantime. .. I am launching 2 more forums of my own.

 

More members than posts? Something smells funny. Were they mostly dead bots? Or incentives offered to register?

 

None. It just had a beautiful skin. www.archive.org Go check. I'll make it easy for you, here.

Most of the bots were banned by the previous admin, and I co-administrated with him. Months before I bought the site, I eliminated more of the spam. There was a lot of spam on video directory, and photo album, or groups, whatever I had to do to take the garbage out. So, by the time I completed the acquisition, I went full steam ahead.

Technically, instead of 3500+ members, the site has 4,800+ members. But because xenForo depreciates the banned members from the equation, CODForums looks like it's got less.

It was only averaging 5 visitors online at once, then back to zero because of vB4's shitty code, then when I moved to xenForo, the growth was noticeable from the get-go. It was averaging 10 to 20 visitors per hour. On the peak months, it was averaging 20 to 50 visitors at once. The maximum average was 50 to 80 per hour. If I used twitter/facebook/google+ that number hovers around 80 to 100 visitors at once. The best number I've gotten was 200. That's just from the xenForo "online now" statistic.

From the analytics view, it told a different story: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/codforums-experiencing-growth.19188/

I took that site from nothing, to a thriving MW3 community, and exploded on Black Ops 2 launch day. I'm expecting another spike around MW4 rumors, and leaks. There already have been scams going around about (a) MW4 beta, and Activision was quick to kill the scam before it got bad. This means, MW4 is real. Oh, very real.

 

The numbers still don't add up even now...

7,489 Posts
3,536 Members

people register but don't post?

my forum has 4700 members but 520k posts... and no general bs.

 

I don't know why, either. Most of the registrations are all about posting clan threads, or videos. I even put my effort in by posting high quality news.

Fortunately, this time around, I made a new forum for MW4 right after BO2 was released. That gives me a head start. Not only that, I've reserved a MW4Blog domain to translate new users over to CODForums just like MW3Blog before it. I went even further by reserving a BO3 Blog domain. 2 years covered!

That number would have been a whole lot better if I had bought BO2Blog earlier, and done news for that site earlier, but I've been struggling with money problems, so I had a plan B ready: www.codnet.com The problem with 2012 was that there were not a lot of leaks around BO2. Not really a lot. So, I was stuck with one teaser image, and another one, then Treyarch released a video a month after. BO2 wasn't really picking up steam until October/November.

Nonetheless, I have a plan with BO3 all the way. I even have a BO3 forum domain.

What general bs are you talking about? Are you trying to say I'm being BS?

 

Chances are, they are leaving all the spam registrations as well. So a good chunk of the members are likely dead accounts and they left them to make the numbers look better (but failed). Ask for the "active" member count instead. Like in the first post, there's a huge difference between the total members and the active members.

 

Wellll... The forum I am looking to take over.... There were no spam registrations..... It is just inactive users at this point since owner stopped investing his time months ago.

 

It's not always the owner's fault, tho. The owner as of right now seems to be giving up on his users because his users don't want to participate and discuss things anymore. I don't think it's the owner's lack of investment that got it where it is now.

When I co-administrated the site alongside the previous owner of CODForums, he poured his time, investment into the site only to have most users not post. So, he gave up, and I noticed. There were a lot of database errors that he could not fix on his own. I swooped in, and bought it outright.

I'm not giving up. I am working on getting this whole network pieced together to create a self-sustaining machine.

I've been administrator of the site since 2009, that's 4 and a half years.

 

You say it is in the same niche as your forum? Well how about you just merge the databases together into your forum and offer the guy a staff position plus a little pay that you can manage? Then get the guy to sell the licence himself.