Selling Alexa 10k 8.4 Million Page Views and 1.4 Million Post Forum

I am now selling HackForums.net. The site is at Alexa 10,892 with recent month under 10k. The site earns revenue from paid subscribers at $5 each per year or $10 lifetime. I had over 1500 paid subscribers. Plus many donated to the site as much as $150. The site also makes about $300+ per month from Adbrite and another $35-$40 from Kontera.

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Paypal proof only given to qualified buyers. I can do monthly report screenshots I believe.

The sites content is perfectly legal. There were no attachments by members and the rules disallowed any discussion on paypal, bank, credit card, or identity fraud. I have had no legal problems from the site as it was run with legalities in mind. New owner can adjust rules to suit their needs.

You might ask why I am selling.

Recently I have had a financial problem in my household. It's personal so I will not give details. I am also no longer interested in running the site. I won't have time as I am soon going to be starting a full time job. So the site must be sold. Time constraints prevent me from taking this further.

The site has over 1.4 million posts in the database and 80k members. All members are email verified and I deleted accounts that were not activated. Over 110k had actually signed up. I began this site in April 2007 from nothing. It runs MyBB forum software. New buyer can easily convert to VBulletin which might help monetize the site even more.

Traffic is huge with about 22k visits per day according to Google Analytics. It's has 300k+ uniques per month with about 8.5 million page views per month. All stats are encouraging for the future and there is no recent downturn in activity.

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Bandwidth is under 1tb a month right now.

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Occassionally the site does get DDOS attacked so I recommend you pay extra for a host that will mitigate them for you. The site has a very dedicated staff of 7 volunteer members. Yet there are many that want to be on staff.

Right now site is not online. You can probably view archive.org or Google Cache as it was just taken offline today. I had one of my servers compromised and I was planning on selling anyways. This just made it happen today. Site will be given to buyer intact with all files and the database. I can also assist in any transitional period.

I am asking in the $xx,xxx range. The site is well worth it and any buyer should be able to immediately monetize. I already have potential buyers in this range so please don't hesitate to contact me. I am a motivated seller. BIN...I will say $30,000. I already have offers in the low $xx,xxx range and this is multiforum posted.

Site is registered at Moniker and I hope to conduct sale through an escrow service or a direct wire transfer.

Feel free to ask any questions.

 

I'll put down an offer of $15,000.

I'm pretty sure you not being admin will mean it will loose some value, but who knows.

So my offer is $15,000 for now.

 

Much of the value is in the new members. With the amount of new fresh daily traffic any new admin will be quickly accepted. Plus long-standing members and moderators are going to support the change for the most part. If the buyer wants I can stay on as admin for a time to help with any transition. I have no problems leading the community for another month or two depending on the terms of the sale.

 

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That's the last 4 months before I stopped taking payments. 90% of that is HF. In July I sold a site for about $1000 here. Namefunk.com...you can even see the thread still. Many of the payments are subscriptions and some are donations. Either way the site does and can make a lot of money.

I have moved the DNS to a temporary host and placed an info page.

 

Hello my name is Alec i would like to bid for $15010

 

I am securing a buyer now. Offers and interest are coming in constantly. I hope potential buyers here also see how loyal and dedicated the members are to the site.

To potential buyers...I can stay on as admin for a time to help in transition and to ease member mindset about any changes you wish to bear on them.

 

My name is Matthew and I would like to place a bid of $25,000

 

looks very strange every bidder here offering high $ for a non-online forum have registered recently and have 0 itrader. dont u think?

 

ht125..these could be fake bids but realize that I have a site with 80,000 members and I have the front page of the site pointing to this thread. These are people that know I am selling and are already familiar with the site. I am negotiating with about 5 people now.

The only thing that matters to me is when escrow is started or when I get a wire transfer.

 

For the simple fact that you took the site offline and told all the members your selling the site degrades the value 10-fold. Good luck on your sale but that was a bad move.

 

Good luck with sales as i know the value of HF really well. i'm there too and guys just a word, its a great opportunity if you know how to administer a great forum

 

I believe site is sold. I am awaiting a deposit in the morning. So once sale is completed I believe site will be up asap. The new owner will not want more downtime.

 

Site is still for sale. Buyer was suppose to send me a deposit today and has not. So until a deposit is sent I am going to continue to accept offers. Feel free to contact me if you are interested.

 

Careful MR. Rectangle, you might be selling this site for much more than its actual worth, or much less than its actual worth, think about this....how much its actually making right now, if your saying that its about $1,500.00 USD per month, than, for $30,000, this might be too high, especially after closing it down. It will take about 2 year and some 6 months itself to regain the $30,000 spent. Also, you may have 80,000 members, but how many real active members, the rest just sit around reading the posts not being active, in my estimation you only have really about as high as 30,000 REAL member that participate possibly 40,000, but certainly not 80,000 fully participating members. Remember this is just my opinion.

 

Thanks for your opinion but unless you're making an offer I don't see the point.

 

eh, sorry, i just didn't have anywhere to post it. This Forum is so big, you probably would't see it, oh nvm, i should have pm'd you....sorry bout that, but its there....

 

I will have the site back up tomorrow for potential buyers to see.

 

if i may ask, is there a specific time? I have been checking HF, and your HF Twitter for updates to see how this site looks. I have seen it twice, but only by google screen shots.

 

Site is now online again but DNS was changed so it may take time to propogate for you.

You can alter your windows hosts file so that www.hackforums.net points to ns2.zanmo.com

 

this is completely different than what i saw...its nicer... how long did this take for you to make? Also, how long did it take until you got members