Is this Forum worth buying?

Hi people,

Im new to ebusiness thus need some advice.

A forum is for sale with a price tag of £500 (830$). The forum has been running for 5 years and is targeted at a niche population which I have other projects aimed at (thus why I want to buy the forum). My only concern is the forum has no adsense integrated and hasn't been looked after so well.

The seller stated that it was registered with DMOZ and that alone is worth quite a bit - is this true?. In terms of SEO, its second (Google) on keyword searches, which is pretty good.

It has roughly 20 people online at any random time and av time spent is about 5 minutes.

I appreciate any help.

 

I don't know. I'd have to see the forum. But I suppose you might not want someone else to snatch it up. LOL But the fact that it still has real people active would make it valuable. If it's even more active, more people might participate in the conversation. It sounds like maybe you just have to clean it up a little bit and remove all the spam posts, at least from what you describe.

 

I'd need to see the forum, content, etc., before I could chime in.

 

you can multiply 365days by the average CPC for the keywords targeted = base value after optimisation

you can search for affiliates offer related to the sites, if you find plenty of them, you can probably move forward
also it will be great if you can see a screenshot/video of the stats

all the best
Hal

 

How many memebers does it have?

How many are active?

Does it have an email list integrated in with it that comes with the forum when you buy?

How many searches per month does the keyword get that brings it up as #2?

 

Are the Google search results of value to you if you ran your own ads for your other sites/products? One way to look at this is would you pay that amount in advertising to get the traffic that the forum's search results provides?

 

Look at it this way.... he hasn't been working on the web site. If he accepts $830 for it most likely that's because $830 is a lot compared to what he can generate with it in 2 years. Otherwise he would just let it sit or continue to work on it.

Expect revenue to be very low. 20 people online at any given time for a forum can be misleading. It could just be a total of 50-60 members that keep coming back.

 

Why don't you ask for stats from the seller 1.unique monthy visits. 2. Google Page rank 3. Alexa rank 4. Geo visitor stats 5. Age group of the visitors .All it depends how is content on the forum. Dmoz lisiting is plus. 830$ price seems fine to me If the stats are good. $320 would have been invested on hosting for five years taking the minimum value. Other is the effort of the admin to build the forum.

 

It definitely doesn't worth $830! Keep searching, $830 for a forum that is only listed in DMOZ and have just 20 visitors every day is a waste of time and money.

I wouldn't give more than $200 for it.

 

Look at the Traffic Stats - preferably using the Google Analytic Tools

You should also look very closely the Alexa Rankings

And well - we can tell you a lot more the Site if you could share the URL with us...

There are a lot of things to consider before making an investment on a Website.

I've bought site before and had many bad experiences so you need to be careful with what you buy and make sure it will be a profitable investment.

Hope this helps!

Cheers!

 

Thank you to everyone for their valuable advice.

The website is ranked 2nd on google for the keyword searches and is ranked in the 160k region globally.

The forum has over 2000 members which isnt too bad I suppose.

Other than that, the website has over 3k unique visitors a month.

The final price weve agreed on is 750$.

What you think guys?

 

look like a good deal and 750$ is reasonable, you have a platform that you can develop and expand really fast
just the 2000members can get your cash back within 30 days
i will recommend you trust your guts, and if your niche is one where people spend money online (check amazon/ebay to validate)

all the best
Hal

 

If you know exactly how to use that revenue to at least earn your money back in the next 30 days then you should go for it!

But you should double make sure that the members are active members and that the 3k visitors a month are legitimate real people coming to the site and not just bots.

If you have a lot of money to play with then I would say buy it and do your best to make it a successful money making website.

I wish you the best success with your projects online!

 

I wouldn't make the decision unless I knew about the current monetization strategy (if there is one), and also how much money is made every month. This will give you a good idea of what you should pay for it, especially once you know about visits per month etc. Although personally I do not think a forum is as valuable as a website, but for others it may be even more valuable, so it also depends on what you have in mind for the forum (what will you bring to the table that wasn't already there).

Hope I helped!

 

2000 members means nothing. How many are active ? how many contribute decent content ? how many are sleeper accts set up by spam bots ?
Most forum moderators I know delete dozens and dozens of spam accts a day.

If you are buying this forum to make money it all boils down to How are you going to make money ? Forums are hard to get money from. How much money do you spend when you go to a forum ? probably nothing.How many ads do you click on ? probably none.

 

Personally I think it's easier to build a web site from scratch than it is to rebuild on top of someones mistakes. If the forum has 2,000 members *generally* the majority of those accounts are inactive. Even if you have a couple hundred active members you may just have 40-50 regulars. Based on that replicating the success of such a site should be *easy*.

To me a Dmoz listing is overrated and worth something years ago. I couldn't give two shits about a dmoz listing. So that should NOT be the deciding factor for purchasing ANY web site.

It appears to me you really like this web site. If you really do like it and believe you can turn it around by all means buy it. But do NOT buy it simply because you feel it's an investment opportunity.

Also...if the web master is willing to let his creation go for as little as $830 (no matter how little it makes) he most likely would sell out for $500. That would be my offer.. $500. Not because it isn't worth $830 but because I know I can get it for a lot less judging by the LACK of interest in his own site and the lack of value he is already placing on it.

 

Ask the seller to setup a survey on the website to see if it actually has active visitors. Or ask to to-the-moment analytics data to prove that high-value visitors are actually landing on the site. But odds are if someone is selling their forum, it's because they're not making money with it.

 

make a simple assesment of the link popularity of the forum,
this could help you in the decision process

if the forum had decent amount of links on majesticseo and opensiteexplorer dot org

if it didn't show up on these 2, i may have some reserve, until the owner explain how he advertised

this may be a big opportunity if the website was not advertised properly

all the best
Hal

 

Hi guys,

Thanks for all the advice - real help.

I've bought the forum for 600$. The forum actually has 6.2k members (my mistake). The mailing list I can attain from the forum will help fuel my other business which is aimed at the same niche. The forum was looked after poorly and was down quite often. Considering these factors, its still got a lot of people returning to it.

Now I need more important advice. Do I stick to the phpBB platform the forum is currently running on, or is it a wise investment to buy vBulletin. Money isnt a problem, the question is, which platform is easier to manage, offers a better customer experience, etc.

Thanks once again!

 

Use xenforo, the best one. There is a tool in dp market place which mods used to move from vbulletin to xenforo, you may find tools from phpbb to xenforo