How many forums have you brought out?

Over the years, I used to be forums and merge them with one of my communities, but I haven't done that in a while. So in other words, how many forums have you brought out?

What did you do with those forums? Merge them? Or kept them running? Discuss.

 

I've bought about 10, merged most with my general forum and any tech related ones will come over here.

 

What were the prices like on those forums? Or you can't disclose them?

 

It would depend on the forum and stats..
my limit is a grand, I wish I could buy really large forums but I'm poor..lol

 

Ya, I would love to buy a large forum, and see what type of revenue could be made from them. Where do you usually buy your forums at? Flippa? Or digitalpoint?

 

I had 6 forums in 4 years and never merged them but if I did I would have gotten members as big as 50k

 

Do you ever wish you had?

 

Nope, I do not think about with members wise; I just want to have a good time and which made me stop is people getting over competitive about forums so I transformed most of my forums into sites and merged them with a CMS

 

So far, 2. I bought MVC3Forum at the end of last year, and then I completed the acquisition of CODForums earlier this year. Even though that with CODForums, it took me a whole year of negotiation to bring me to a few months of full acquistion that started on November 7th, until January.

I would say 3, but the third acquisition was a blog - MW3Blog.

It was a long road for me, very long road to success.

 

How are the forums doing now that you've owned it? Like, how much growth have they optained and such?

 

MVC3 is a niche that is hard to capture as a forum - MVC3Forum has gained 20 thousand views since I bought it. However, the views to members ratio is very low that it's saddening.

CODForums has done better, though. When I bought it, it was a 2263 member site. vB4 made it hard for people to register and post. Frustrating as this was, I gave vBulletin another chance after chance. And then finally, I stumbled across a situation and got more than what I bargained for. Since the switch to xenForo, CODForums has been seeing a steady stream of traffic but only with some work... I saw more people registering, I saw more people using the search function, I saw more people visiting the site... It's growing. Ever since I put a new background for the header, the traffic jumped so much that there's more registrations.

As for MW3Blog? Well, that one's obviously growing. More than I imagined, though. 50 thousand plus unique visitors in less than 5 months.

 

Thanks good bro @Carlos I'm sure the community at MVC3Forum will pick up with a little bit more work, yes?
What prompt you to switch to Xenforo over vBulletin? That's suprising how the traffic went up on Codforums after the software change.

 

When I bought MVC3Forum, I had 3 xenforo licenses sitting in my account.

The previous owner of MVC3Forum was selling only the domain and database, so I had to use what I had.

 

Gotcha. Good software of chosing as well. How are your users enjoying Xenforo? How's the activity?

 

I've never merged any databases before and all my posts are earned. The only concern I have with merging is multiple topics and such.

 

Couple years ago I bought a small forum for ~$400 and went nuts -- I had a style made, logo, etc. Spent about a grand overall and a month later decided I wasn't interested and sold it back to the original owner for a 50% profit.

Woot woot, it would've been cheaper if he'd just hired me to do what I did but hey you wanna throw away money I'm not gonna stop ya.

 

That's the best way to do it. What did the members think when the original owner bought it back?

 

I don't know I never looked back to be honest. It was a first for me. Just handed him the password to the hosting account and he did what he had to do.

 

I have never bought a forum. I don't have the time to go through and change stuff that I might not like, and I don't want to pay people and then never get the forum.

 

It was good for a while until the market fizzled out, so therefore, my forums fizzled out. I'm going to merge the forum with a larger forum soon.

The seller of that domain/forum is going to have to give you the forum because you can easily be sued for the damages, and then lose everything associated with the forum. On top of that, you stand to lose more if you don't give the forum over to the new owner.

The seller's reputation goes into the toilet once they don't give it to you. Scammers don't care about this, but serious sellers do.