Okay over the past few days I have taken some heat for my reviews of the forums posted on here. But I have very good reason for my ratings and I am going to try and explain some things about buying sites and selling them on the internet.
I am the manager of a company who does among other things buy and sell online properties. As such I have a good understanding of what is valuable and what is not valuable online. Yes you can sell anything, as PT Barnum once said "there is a sucker born every minute". But if you true what to understand the value of your site you need to really look at a few things.
Content
The first thing which is critical to a site is content. I cannot stress this enough. Content content content! You must have something for a buyer to be interested. I have seen hundreds of websites and forums who have a spectacular appearance but have no substance. Yes, your site looks nice but so what. Why would I want to visit you site if it has nothing to offer?
Content also needs to be original, and good. You may have 100,000 posts on a forum but if 90,000 of those posts suck you're sites not going to be worth very much. Quality over quantity is a fine line but a forum with 40,000 quality topics is going to be worth more than one with 100,000 spam posts.
Age
Age is really something a lot of people over look when valuing a site. If your site is 3 days old and has 3,000 posts that site's going to have a lot more value than a site that is a year old with the same number of posts.
Just because your site is old also does not make it more valuable than a newer site. But if your site is established with an established cliential than it becomes a lot more valuable.
A good rule for a forum is that after 1 year you should about 75,000 posts per year of operations and after about 3 years that should go up to 100,000 per year.
Page Rank
Page ranking is a bit of a misnomer on the value of a website but it is important. I personally have some issues with the Google page ranking system because it has some clear biases and it's mystery formula leaves me a bit skeptical of how they run things.
But at a quick glance this can be helpful, especially with an established site. If the site has good content and is updated frequently but has a low page rank it always raises a few red flags. It could simply be because the owner isn't advertising very effectively but it could also mean there are some bad back links which could be an issue.
Appearance
You'd be shocked at how little and how much appearance can effect the value of a site. I have seen sites with 1,000,000 posts but have very simple layouts where great looking sites have very few. I think you've all probably seen this, a good example of this is the image board 4chan(beware there is adult content here). 4chan has a very simple interface which is fairly user friendly. It;s all about the interface and how your users can interact with it. If its over complicated its going to cause people to stay away and will bring down your value.
Now a nice looking site with an easy interface is a gold mine. look at Facebook. It's easy and it's asethically pleasing and it has become the most popular social networking site on the internet. Forum Promotion here has done a very good job of managing these two features into a very good forum and a very valuable forum.
Users
I saved the most important feature for last. Weather your users or visitors to a website or people posting on your forum if I am going to buy a site this is what I look for. Is there a wide verity of users which help the forum?
Users tie in nicely with content, usually if you have one you will get the other. So, if you want to sell your site you should start with content to increase users.
Domains
This is a tie in to everything above, but if you're only selling a domain here are keys to think about.
.com, .net. org: These are the three things people want. They're going to be the most valuable of the domain names to a buyer. Sometimes a .uk or .fr ect will have some value for that region and at that point you have to kind of become a niche marketer.
These domains are more valuable because they're what people search first. If I am looking for a car I am going to go to cars.com before I go to cars.us or cars.info ect.
Length and actual words matter too. cars.com is a great domain because it's simple and direct. mozgozxqp.gingerbread.ut.us is not a good domain name because it's hard to remember. People are simple and like simplicity.
Pricing
When we buy a site we look at the above things and factor them together to come up with a general price of what we're willing to pay. Yes it may very by what we want the site for and how much we think we can resell it for. This is generally a guide list we use.
Forums:
Sites under 50,000 posts: Less than 500 dollars. But they need to be fairly new, be growing and have some potential.
50,000-100,000 posts: They can go up to 10,000 dollars depending on the site, the content and potential.
100k-250k: The least we have ever bought a forum for was 13,000 dollars. The most was 45,000 dollars.
250K-500K: I would say that a good starting point on this kind of site would be about 30,000 dollars and could be more depending on the content.
over 500K: These sites are very difficult to buy and sell and they're the true gold mines. Usually ads alone will make the owner 60,000 plus a year, so you must offer them something that will make them take your lump sum of money over that perpetual income of their site. A few months ago we bought a forum with 2.8 million posts for 330,000 dollars. We turned that site around and sold it for just under 990,000 dollars. This site was unique in that it had all the above features and basically an overwhelmed owner. We got it for a steal we think and sold it cheaper than what we could have.
Again, all this depends on what the buyer wants, and what the sell wants to pay. I have read of forums with 1 million posts being sold as low as 10,000 dollars.
I am the manager of a company who does among other things buy and sell online properties. As such I have a good understanding of what is valuable and what is not valuable online. Yes you can sell anything, as PT Barnum once said "there is a sucker born every minute". But if you true what to understand the value of your site you need to really look at a few things.
Content
The first thing which is critical to a site is content. I cannot stress this enough. Content content content! You must have something for a buyer to be interested. I have seen hundreds of websites and forums who have a spectacular appearance but have no substance. Yes, your site looks nice but so what. Why would I want to visit you site if it has nothing to offer?
Content also needs to be original, and good. You may have 100,000 posts on a forum but if 90,000 of those posts suck you're sites not going to be worth very much. Quality over quantity is a fine line but a forum with 40,000 quality topics is going to be worth more than one with 100,000 spam posts.
Age
Age is really something a lot of people over look when valuing a site. If your site is 3 days old and has 3,000 posts that site's going to have a lot more value than a site that is a year old with the same number of posts.
Just because your site is old also does not make it more valuable than a newer site. But if your site is established with an established cliential than it becomes a lot more valuable.
A good rule for a forum is that after 1 year you should about 75,000 posts per year of operations and after about 3 years that should go up to 100,000 per year.
Page Rank
Page ranking is a bit of a misnomer on the value of a website but it is important. I personally have some issues with the Google page ranking system because it has some clear biases and it's mystery formula leaves me a bit skeptical of how they run things.
But at a quick glance this can be helpful, especially with an established site. If the site has good content and is updated frequently but has a low page rank it always raises a few red flags. It could simply be because the owner isn't advertising very effectively but it could also mean there are some bad back links which could be an issue.
Appearance
You'd be shocked at how little and how much appearance can effect the value of a site. I have seen sites with 1,000,000 posts but have very simple layouts where great looking sites have very few. I think you've all probably seen this, a good example of this is the image board 4chan(beware there is adult content here). 4chan has a very simple interface which is fairly user friendly. It;s all about the interface and how your users can interact with it. If its over complicated its going to cause people to stay away and will bring down your value.
Now a nice looking site with an easy interface is a gold mine. look at Facebook. It's easy and it's asethically pleasing and it has become the most popular social networking site on the internet. Forum Promotion here has done a very good job of managing these two features into a very good forum and a very valuable forum.
Users
I saved the most important feature for last. Weather your users or visitors to a website or people posting on your forum if I am going to buy a site this is what I look for. Is there a wide verity of users which help the forum?
Users tie in nicely with content, usually if you have one you will get the other. So, if you want to sell your site you should start with content to increase users.
Domains
This is a tie in to everything above, but if you're only selling a domain here are keys to think about.
.com, .net. org: These are the three things people want. They're going to be the most valuable of the domain names to a buyer. Sometimes a .uk or .fr ect will have some value for that region and at that point you have to kind of become a niche marketer.
These domains are more valuable because they're what people search first. If I am looking for a car I am going to go to cars.com before I go to cars.us or cars.info ect.
Length and actual words matter too. cars.com is a great domain because it's simple and direct. mozgozxqp.gingerbread.ut.us is not a good domain name because it's hard to remember. People are simple and like simplicity.
Pricing
When we buy a site we look at the above things and factor them together to come up with a general price of what we're willing to pay. Yes it may very by what we want the site for and how much we think we can resell it for. This is generally a guide list we use.
Forums:
Sites under 50,000 posts: Less than 500 dollars. But they need to be fairly new, be growing and have some potential.
50,000-100,000 posts: They can go up to 10,000 dollars depending on the site, the content and potential.
100k-250k: The least we have ever bought a forum for was 13,000 dollars. The most was 45,000 dollars.
250K-500K: I would say that a good starting point on this kind of site would be about 30,000 dollars and could be more depending on the content.
over 500K: These sites are very difficult to buy and sell and they're the true gold mines. Usually ads alone will make the owner 60,000 plus a year, so you must offer them something that will make them take your lump sum of money over that perpetual income of their site. A few months ago we bought a forum with 2.8 million posts for 330,000 dollars. We turned that site around and sold it for just under 990,000 dollars. This site was unique in that it had all the above features and basically an overwhelmed owner. We got it for a steal we think and sold it cheaper than what we could have.
Again, all this depends on what the buyer wants, and what the sell wants to pay. I have read of forums with 1 million posts being sold as low as 10,000 dollars.
