Gaming site and forum - 430,000+ posts, 3600+ members

Website: http://www.ffrepublic.com
Topic: Final Fantasy, Gaming, General Chat
Age of site: over 5 years
Revenue: site has never been monetized

Traffic stats: unfortunately, I don't have reliable traffic stats. My webalizer stats seemed to be messed up because I have 20 times bandwidth usage it shows. Analog stats show the following:

Analyzed requests from Tue, May 16 2006 at 9:13 AM to Mon, Jun 26 2006 at 9:22 PM (41.51 days).
Successful requests: 3,500,287
Average successful requests per day: 84,331
Successful requests for pages: 122,269
Average successful requests for pages per day: 2,945
Failed requests: 22,237
Redirected requests: 158,709
Distinct files requested: 5,007
Distinct hosts served: 6,501
Data transferred: 20.24 gigabytes
Average data transferred per day: 499.30 megabytes



Forums
Forum stats:
Posts: 433,392
Members: 3,605 (7520 without pruning inactive members)
Threads: 20,811
Most users ever online was 127, 06.09.06 at 05:31:01.

Posts per day: 850 (average last month)
Maximum posts per day within last month: 1615

This forum was a vBulletin's featured forum of the month back in year 2002.

Site
Uses state of the art software that was build by a programmer working at a rate of $40/ho. The software has the following features:

• User submitted news
• Submission category management
• Submission moderation queues
• Submissions fully integrated with forums (posting news on the site makes it appear in the forums)
• Submission comments fully integrated with forums
• Full content management from the backend.
• SEO'd URLs - http://www.ffrepublic.com/final-fantasy-1/walkthrough/sky-palace
• Several hundred pages of unique content all written by volunteer staff
• Image uploader to allow staff to upload images without giving them FTP access
• Staff usergroups and membergroups so you can allow certain people to have acess to certain elements of the site
• Content Tables module for easy management of submitted content tables, such as http://www.ffrepublic.com/final-fantasy-9/side-quests/ragtime-mouse
• Smilies management, BBCode management, easy addition of website pages through the admin CP http://www.ffrepublic.com/affiliation_request
• A robust templating system that allows addition of multiple layouts
• Easy site options, permissions and user management.

You get full rights to use this software. Cost of software development was $3000.

Description: I became the owner of this site after a nearly two year downtime. The site has been successfully revived, the forums are more active than they have ever been, and everything is in place for the new owner to run the site easily without any problems what so ever.

Reason for selling: I will not have Internet access for what seems to be a month in August. God knows what can happen to a nice site like this in that period of time.

Time being spent on this site: Couple of hours per week. News are added by volunteer staff (and done quite well), content is added by volunteer writers, forums are managed by volunteer admins/mods

Money spent on advertising: $0

Expenses: Virtually none, the site can run on any host that costs $10.


Please do not post a live URL to the site in this thread. Thanks.

Sale includes a 5 hour tutorial session with the new owner.


Price: $4000 (that's what it cost me to get this site up and running. Don't bother with an offer of less, won't accept it)
BIN: $7,000
Payment method: Escrow.com (buyer pays fees).

 

Hi,

Looks great. Archive.org has you indexed all the way back to 2001.

forums.ff....com has a pagerank of 4. Do you have any idea why the main site is showing a pagerank of 0?

I don't suppose you can get the referer stats from your analog stats or the raw log files. I'm particularly interested in search engine traffic.

 

There was no main site for ages, in fact, until May 18th, this year. Well, there was one way back in the day - you can look in archive.org for it, but it was down for "reconstruction" that ended up never happening and the main domain was redirected to the forums. That's why the forums have a PR and the site does not.

I'm not sure about ranking in the search engines - maybe the forums threads have some sort of a rank, but the site's quite new. The potential is clear though, because all these hits I've been getting are from dedicated members of the forums, and now there is a site. It's also the reason why so much was invested into the site - to give an easy way for content writers to quickly add SEO'd content, and that's what has been and still is happening, and considering the size of the forums and the number of people interested in helping, it just doesn't seem to run out of volunteers.

 

SOLD for the BIN price of $7,000

 

man...I just saw the post, never saw bin..happened less than 1 min interval.. spdude..nice buy man.

 

lol, congrats to both of you -- very nice designwork on the site.

 

good luck with the site!

 

Nice buy spdude,I got excited when i read the guys post

 

great site and great buy...congrats to both!

 

wow congrats. you move fast. ;-)

 

Boy spdude is fast. Everytime I see a site that looks interesting or worth purchasing, he nails them fast. I guess I'm getting better at picking the good ones. The ones I like, he likes.

 

hahaha Thanks for the complement.

 

Payment recieved, domains and other stuff moved over, sale complete! Thanks to the buyer for a very nice and smooth deal!

 

DAMN I WANTED THAT SITE... I guess I was too late

You suck

 

... man another missed one grats to both parties

 

very nice website. good luck to both of you

 

Well, too late for me!

 

way to bring up an old post....

 

Red rep for you, for clogging up an auction section with year old sales!!

 

same here - red point for hunting posts not best way to start your life in this forums...