Has anyone ever sold their forum?

How do you determine its true value? I've seen sites where you can plug in a url and it will estimate the value of the site. Would you use this as part of the equation?

Is there an actual established method for selling a forum? Would it be any different from selling a "normal" website?

Yeah, I know, a lot of questions.

 

The value is determined by what a buyer is willing to actually pay for acquiring it. Anything else is just pure speculation. If you're actually considering selling a forum, you can send me via pm some info about it (url, revenue and traffic) and I will give you a ballpark.

 

Usually a forum sells based on how active it is, the traffic, numbers of active users, and how much content is available on the given community. I'm not so sure about the price range value however. Perhaps @WEfail can help us?

 

Yeah, but how do you determine any baselines for negotiating things? I'm thinking that there's got to be some kind of formula or concrete guidelines.

 

To be honest, I never liked selling/buying websites. Because if I sold my website to someone, they will shut it down within 3-4 months, and use the domain to redirect to their own website. And that bothers me in some cases. :/ Thats my opinion of course.

 

The only really useful "formula" would be a multiple of the forum's profits. I buy quite a few forums myself, and can tell you for sure that the profits is not the most important factor for me. Things such as the topic of the forum, whether it has an active member base, the characteristics of that member base, the site's traffic, the forum software, and how well monetized it is all are at least as important to me.

There are some factors that to me are insignificant, such as the post count for example. These factors may be important to other, less experienced buyers, but the more sophisticated buyer won't get hung up on numbers like the post count, and how many threads are on a forum. Also, the number of members can be deceptive. For example, you might see a forum with 50,000 members, but hardly anyone posting. I'm going to assume out of the gate that this means the forum admin didn't protect the forum very well from spam accounts and what they're trying to sell you is a big bag full of spam.

Anyway, the bottom line is that you'll hear a lot of people say a lot of things and none of it really means anything if it is not backed up by an actual offer to buy your forum. Someone could tell you that your forum is worth $125,000 for example, but that's worth shit if they're not putting that in an offer to buy and have the money ready to pay.

 

There are two things...

1. current revenue
2. Potential revenue.

Got to run out to a client meeting, however I will respond here in full.

 

- last 12 month revenue x 3-8 year return.
- what a buyer is willing to pay.

before selling, consider capital gains and taxation on you & the corporation (if you have one)

Like PDiddy said, traffic and niche are important to some buyers too (like me).

I am looking to buy but im cheap. LOL

 

Thanks for the insights. It's not so simple, not that I expected it to be.

 

I sold a webmaster forum I created about 2 years ago. It's dead now, and I sold it for $200 at the time. It had just over 1000 posts.

 

I have sold 2 forums so far not for very much but neither one was huge.

 

I've never sold my forum and don't intend on doing it. Selling a forum seems like too much work to transfer everything over and I think it will just be a complete utter headache.... buy hey that's just me.

 

I guess if you don't think your making enough revenue or it'd be such a great deal to sell it to a bidder then you would. If someone offered me quite the ton of money for my forum I would accept hoping they don't use my forum for the incorrect means. I went through lots of sleepless nights sorting my forum out so selling it better be worth my time!

 

I believe it depends on content the owner has created and posts on the forum as many forum owners try to sell forums as quick as possible but it doesn't always work like that a forum needs posts.

 

This is my personal opinion on selling a forum. If you care about your forum at all DON'T DO IT!. Every one of the forums I sold were killed off or absorbed into other forums. No one is going to have the same compassion running your forum the same way you do.

Greg

P.S. I have seen some forms that were sold survive but nine times out of ten the forum dies out.

 

Is buying a forum a good investment?

 

I have only sold a forum once, it was a forum with a dozen of members, a dozen of topics on friendship and a tweaked layout to display Adsense and a friendship-related affiliate program.

It was built using Advance Electron Forum as a software over an INFO domain.

I sold this forum, domain name and related Twitter and Gmail accounts for around $25 in a moment that nobody wanted to buy INFO domains.

Funny thing is that they guy who bought this bundle never used none of these items. The domain expired untouched and the Twitter account never updated and still with my last post before the sale. Who knows if he ever used at least the matching gmail account included with his purchase.

 

Too many factors to consider with a blanket question like that.
Yes, and No?
Maybe...

All depends really.