What made you create a site dedicated to Call of Duty?
In 2008, I was playing Call of Duty 4, and I fell in love with the franchise. All day, mornings, afternoon, and nights. Until the next morning. At this point I was already a proponent of Community Forums. I was a member of many forums, to see what sticks. I was co-owner of a large xbox site with a forum attached to it. I was a moderator of a few Nintendo sites. One was a large Nintendo site. That same forum merged into a multipurpose gaming site, to become a 2 Million posts community.
So! I discovered COD4Boards. I became a part of the community, fell in love with it. I looked at "CODForums" and saw it was taken. I became a part of it. CoD4Boards (and COD4Forums) were so popular, it became 100k members (the other one was a lil lower because of IPB's SEO was poor at the time), sooo....
The owner sold them for
24 thousand EACH. I'm not kidding. It made me wonder - "what if I just... bought CODForums?" We were both in college, and I was doing business classes at the time. Aced it. Learned marketing first and second hand concurrently. The guy that owned CODForums wasn't investing the love, sweat, tears into building CODForums - so much untapped potential.
Over the next few years I discovered BlackOpsForum, and was a part of it.. It too became the largest Call of Duty Forum. Dunno how, but i learned the community was toxic, and i learned from their mistakes, too. Eventually, it was sold for at least close to 15k. Lower than CODBoards. The owner did it again with BlackOps2Forum. The next time - I fixed the original problem: I purchased Black Ops 3 Forums and Black Ops 4 Forums subsequently.
What are your future short and long terms plan for the online community?
To grow it beyond 100k posts and members. We just broke 40,000 posts recently.
@Carlos X great job with all of your forums. Where do you get your themes from for the sites? They look awesome.
I visualize how the site would look before buying. Then I would window shop, but my two main ones are Audentio, and PixelExit.
How have you been able to continuously acquire these top dollar domains across your entire network? I assume you end up sitting on these system specific domains for a long time before they take off. I’m sure PS5Forum is a good example of that.
I won't reveal how I purchased CODForums, because I'll be in trouble later. But afterwards it was because I had a job, and sometimes profits. For example, many small acquisitions were done by profits from ads. PS5Forum is the funnier story - I had $600 bonus from my job, I was ready to take a risk. I eyed PlayStation because we were getting ready for next gen with all the silent rumors of the next consoles, Xbox being the louder one with Project Scorpio, and Scarlett. So when I looked at PS5Forum, it was taken, but it had a splash screen with the value. $600. I was stunned - but kept my mouth shut and bought it. Sat on it, and quietly, patiently wait...
In August 2018... the owner of PS4Forum was months from pulling the plug. I rushed and registered to stop it in its tracks. Thank God I waited 10 years because the guy was going to sell it for 24k. I bought it for $1k. The Godaddy appraisal says its worth 2k.
Luck. Pure luck.
When did you get into gaming?
3-4 years old.
