Does your community have any competitors?

My community only has one competitor - and they've been opened since August 2009, where we re-launched January 21, 2011 - they opened when we crashed, but here's the difference in stats.

My stats:

Their stats:

We obviously get more traffic - but we just need to pass their posts count, and we win. But, look at the difference in opening dates - what do you guys think?'

Also, does your forum have any competitors? List your stats, and theirs, but don't link them - as their competitors. =P

 

My Forum has many competitors but I compete with only one forum. Their content is useless because half of their posts is in their general discussion section. And they use RSS Feeds from many sites to raise their post count. They have more members and posts but the reason for that is because before they converted to xenforo they merged 3 or 4 forum databases into it, so you can say its not legit.

 

Well, some forums have multiple competitors - where others don't have any. So, do you have to work hard because you have some competitors? Personally, I've surpassed all the competitors I had in my niche because we worked harder, and stepped up our promotion and such.

What about you? What forums do you see as competitors to yours, and why are they your competitors? Do you feel that you can surpass them in content and such? It's always nice to have goals to chase - especially beating an competitor.

 

Both my current forums have tons of competition

My first two forums had very little and grew very fast because of it!

 

Ya, I bet its pretty hard with your general forums - there's a lot of competition in that market, but you seem to be doing pretty well. How many GC forums are bigger than yours?

 

Oh there are tons of gen forums larger then mine and 10 times that which are more active
My site has some great content but it could be a lot more active.
It's okay, I enjoy giving the members a place to hang out that's safe.

Forums can always be "more active"

 

I'm so glad that I surpassed my competitor in stats and traffic numbers. They had to die.

 

My forum has a lot of competitors. I don't want to hunt for stats as I'd only get depressed when comparing them. The forum I run is in the gaming niche, so there's lots of giants about in the same niche. We're not delusional enough to think we can take these giants on, but we do feel that there's enough potential users around to get a semi-decent user-base.

 

Well at the moment, no we do not have any competitors but when we where a Gaming Community we had so many competitors DDOS'n our site and stuff. I am now happy that we have no competitors and have a nice chilled out community going.

 

Nope, I don't really have any competitors.

 

I've got two main competitors that cater to mobile DJs. Stats wise they have years on me so I don't fare well. For the most part, we exist without stepping on each other's toes much. We do share a lot of the same member base. There are also several smaller forums that I don't pay much attention to.

As for club jocks, they get all the attention there are several huge communities for them but I don't cater to that niche.

 

Being a soccer forum my forum competed with all the other soccer ones out there just like all the admin forums compete with one another, but I haven't had any direct competitors.

 

If people DDos your site, you should tell your host to block those IPs from incoming traffic or get a firewall installed on your server.

 

About a million. What the heck....it makes it interesting and a challenge. The worst that could happen is a retool.

 

Ya, here's an update on my forum stats and our competitor:

Them:

It's safe to say we gave them a run for their money and took over the niche. When you work hard, and are very dedicated to your forum, then you can see so many great numbers and members coming together in one great community. I believe competitors are a good thing because it helps you improve your forum, come up with new ideas to attract their users as well, and various other things like marketing your community as the best one.

 

I run a Young Adult book Forum called Fear The Fayz that I have recently just set up with Mybb software about 11 days ago.
Fear the Fayz is my second forum...a continuation of my first forum called Fayz Nation.

We have a BITTER and STRONG "Site War" with another similar site called Gaiaphage.com which targets the same book.
They hate us, We hate them. In fact they were the main reason Fayz Nation was shut down because it was hosted on forumotion
and they disliked us so much that they basically reported us until the site was closed.

Let's Compare:

Gaiaphage(January 2010-Feb 2012)
aka our competitors

3,002 members
450,000 Posts(Most of these posts are from General Chat stuff...Not related to their actual niche/forum subject)
and about 200 members online(60% are usually guests) and about 100-120 regular monthly users


Fayz Nation(October 2011- Feb 2012)
(My first site)

1,067 Members
31, 000 posts(Half of these posts are actually related to our niche)
about 90-100 users online(30% are guests)
and about 200-300 regular monthly users.



Gaiaphage managed to beat the first site in overall member count and post count but has a 2 year head stare on us but Fayz Nation managed to beat GP's growth. It took Fayz nation 4 months to accumulate over 1,000 members and Gaiaphage took about 10 months. So i take that as a good sign

Fear The Fayz(February 2012)
(My Current Site...10-12 days old)

92 Members
6,000 Posts

FTF is only about 10-12 old therefore it doesn't directly compete with Gaiaphage JUST YET as I am still getting the site set up. But I do want to note that being only 10 days old or so, FTF has actually managed to bypass the overall Monthly post count of Fayz Nation's first 2 months...>I take that as a good sign.

I am focusing on getting FTF set up for the rest of Feb because i plan to start battling with Gaiapahge head to head in March because the Author's newest book comes out in April. It's really kind of sad how much both of these sites battle....We're sort of the underdog and they are mad because members of their site have actually left to join ours

 

My CODForums has a lot of competitors, but one in particular pisses me off. CODForums was created during the rise of Call of Duty, that was 8 years ago on Oct 2003. That's only the domain. But the other forum was created on May 2010, and has grown to these numbers in a short amount of time:

3,403 Threads
16,699 Posts
5,264 Members

Nothing pisses me off more than a new website growing larger than my site:

1,347 Threads
4,282 Posts
2,471 Members

The worst part is that when I approached the owner to acquire the site, early in the game. It was at these numbers:

39 active members
80 total members
221 threads
1,342 posts

The owner was trying to be evil by asking for 3,000 dollars at the time, but when I saw the site grow to these numbers:

Threads 921
Posts 6,052
Members 1,498

Guess how much money the guy was asking for?


$10,000!

That's just for the domain and forum database.

The guy thinks someone is going to buy his site for 3,000 dollars at that number, and then when I came back, he had the balls to jack the price up because he knows me, and that I own a company. Then, just to make an insult to injury he goes and says "I will sell my site to a real corporation." I'm like... "What'd you just say?" Obviously I was pissed.

 

@Carlos That's pretty rough, but have you managed to figure out why they're growing so fast and such? Once you figure that out, you could probably stop their rapid growth and plus its not worth that price he was asking for... That's just ridiculous.

 

I already know what the forum did to bolster visits, it's really more of a blackhat SEO tactic.

The competing call of duty forum uses "Call of Duty MW3 Forums" and "MW3 Forums" instead of the domain name it uses. There isn't consistency anywhere in the site. That forum stands to lose more than my forum would because my forum is capturing not just the cod forums keyword, it's capturing the cod forum keyword, too. Go figure.

Keep in mind, the forum has vB4 with vBSEO installed. The twitter handle for the site was taken by another person. The facebook vanity url was also taken by another person. I have a twitter handle for CODForums, and I also have the Facebook vanity name. I have more advantages than him.

And technically, the forum is stealing MW3Forum's market.

One last tidbit, while I was "negotiating" the deal with the owner, he tried to advertise his site [on CODForums] by not only registering with the URL. He was also posting threads or posts that don't really have any meaning but to drive traffic to his forum. I dunno about you, but that smells of desparation in my opinion. The question I asked myself is: "What's CODForum doing on CODForums?"

I do know this: The person buying the domain is seriously going to be ripped off.

 

@Carlos I really don't think you'll have anything to worry about - especially if the domain sells, and they're using blackhat SEO. I don't usually condone this - but have you tried reporting the site via Google webmaster tools?[I believe you still can], and alert them of the blackhat SEO that they're using to climb the rankings. I'm sure Google will look into it. Some people use blackhat SEO to their advantage where others use it and it makes them look like a clown. Especially since the keywords aren't in their domain name and such.