UK Games Industry Community - 3 years old, 11 staff, PR3

BIN $5700

Start bidding @ $100

Auction ends: July 20th

PM for private offers
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iVirtuaForums.com full rights to domain, full site source code and everything that’s on the server.
VPS with UK 2 Ips 256RAM Unlimited bandwidth

Established March 2006 – started as an InvisionFree forum and grown to a large gaming industry hub

Note before reading:
· We were approached in 2007 by a Chinese company wanting to buy your software to licence it. At the time we wanted to keep the software completely unique. They offered us $8000 to buy our software off us.

· We received an offer to buy the whole site in its entirety mainly for its database in early 2008. At this time we were not ready to sell and we were offered £6200.

Why are we selling?

The managers of the site are moving on to new projects, and we would love to be able to spend the time we want to on the site but regrettably cant as much now. We need someone else to continue the site with passion, which is why we are selling the site for so little money.

What is iVirtua Exclusive Community?
· An exclusive gaming industry community targeted to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses and Students in the sectors and industries of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely related with it's Business and Industry.
· A Rich content driven service including articles, contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads, and debate.
· We strive to cater for cultural influencers, technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
· A medium to share your or contribute your ideas, experiences, questions and point of view or network with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
What’s included in the custom software itself – iVirtua Web Operating System 4

Fully optimised for SEO software could be used for any other community site

· Full source of custom forum and content management system
· Article management
· Friends adding and management system (colleague add and recommend)
· Flash game management with high scores integration (advanced)
· Download manager (mothballed but easily enabled)
· Fully SEO optimised with SEO friendly advanced URLS and other enhancements for search engine bots.
· Learning and tutorial management system
· Polling system with multiple poll advanced options
· Fully featured forum posting system
· Teamspeak integration
· Skype interrelation
· AIM integration
· Secure login system
· Custom registration system
· Rapid contact system for Ivirtua Help
· Web 2.0 style Tag cloud system
· Relation articles system with many configurable options including amount listed, for valuable SEO inlinks and organic searches
· Optimisation for “cash system” – easy expansion for RPG style running
· Clean valid code throughout
· Anti spam technology without the need for annoying captchas or email validation.
· Anti spam bot technology – iVirtua has not seen spam bots for over a year – propriety software developer in house.
· WYSIWYG editors for posting topics and private messaging – advanced AJAX based with YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google video integration and HTML to BBCODE converters
· Multiple RSS importers (News feeds can be automatically posted to the forum or CMS)
· Podcast integration ( iVirtua once ran a podcast)
· Very easily themed with just the need to change a single CSS file
· Theme changing systems

Myspace.com/ivirtuacommunity IS included with full admin access

About the forum:
· Number of posts: 49047
· Posts per day: 58.55
· Number of topics: 15796
· Topics per day: 18.86
· Number of users: 4179
· Users per day 6.99

Analytics:

Averages:
19,225 Visits per month
32,899 Page views per month
88.84% New Visitors – growing rapidly

June statistics:
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/4360/24722504dr2.jpg

All stats for June 2008:

Main statistics - pageviews etc


Traffic:


Geo location


Browsers:


Valuable database with full marketing details (see http:/www.ivirtuaforums.com/join for what information is collected)

The Database contains almost 5000 users in the gaming industry, which would probably be valued higher than the site itself – information includes real name, country location, valid email address and interests, age and skills.

Members include:
· The editor of UK magazine iCreate
· Robert Scoble, US Blogger
· Melinda Seccington UK games blogger,
· Gaming network administrators
· James Coombs, UK LAN centre expert and entrepreneur
· Kevin April Spymac CEO
· various Microsoft alumni
· podcasters and those in the creative industry.
· Games developers

Mentioned 4 times on MASHABLE.com iVIrtua has soley broken many new scoops such as the BBC’s social bookmarking links and UK iTunes movies

See

· http://www.ivirtuaforums.com/add-windows-live-id-to-your-website-t10735
· http://mashable.com/2007/08/20/windows-live-web-id-authentication/
· http://mashable.com/2007/08/27/digg-redesign/

· http://intotheunknown.co.uk/2007/09/opera-kestrel-just-keeps-on-soaring.html

AS SEEN IN UK GAMING INDUUSTRY MAGAZINE TWO MONTHS RUNNING

· Edge Magazine – iVirtua Forums.com “Serious Forum, Serious Gamers” featuring this slogan (thanks to Oliver at edge magazine future publishing)

Consistent Alexa and Compete ranks

Several Press released distributed with much praise from the community, a cleanly designed site with a fresh and friendly community.
Fully featured administration system with software firewall, tracking systems, IP loggers, and security suite

Our journalists have covered live events at WWDC and games developers expo

· Whitelisted domain with 3 year reputation
· Google PR of up to 4 in the past, currently 3
· Previous Sublinks on google

· Highest position in google for “runescape autos” and high traffic generation as a result
· (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&hs=98w&q=runescape+autos&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK|countryGB )
· High rank for runescape related posts

· Gaming industry niche concentration – easily developed with further SEO

We pride ourselves in being transparent and open people, Myself Sam England and also William Tildesley or Jay Taylor would be wiling to meet you in the UK if we are around – anywhere in the North of England or if you are in Carlisle (UK) meet up for a coffee anytime.

Highlights and Unique points
As well as the unique software and CMS, you get this:

An amazing collection of individuals all networked closely with the team at ivirtua at your disposal, networked by meeting those people in person, and also through 3 years if hard work.


11 experienced and loyal community staff members spanning the globe from the USA to India and even Australia, staff with expertise and passion.

A team of 3 highly skilled developers and also 2 server administrators working for free currently or low cost freelance work for more projects – a team leader who had worked with PHP, ASP and Debian Linux systems who manages a fully outsourced team.

See http://www.ivirtuaforums.com/help

The following staff will LEAVE following this sale:

Sam England – the current director and site manager

Jamie Taylor – the current Director of Operations will be available for assisting with the merge, he will be on hand at all times to train the buyer with the software and put the buyer in contact with the entire team and also troubleshoot any problem which arises. Jamie may continue working with iVirtua Community for the foreseeable future.

Monetization:

Google Adsense – revenue will not be disclosed but has been very successful, though monetization was never a main priority over $9000 has been gained from the simple implementation of the ads overt the past 1 year.

Kontera ads – the most successful advertising so far has gained over $1000 in the last 5 months

http://www.vibrantmedia.com/
Vibrant Media (intelliTXT) - an ad deal was signed for and we were able to prove for over 100,000 unique vies per month this can be proved with emails or paper work – a record will still be held with them if the owner wished to take up VibrantADS (intelliTXT ads) used by major networks such as CNET.

iVirtua was deemed to be content rich enough for this deal!

We did not take this up at the time because we were already using Kontera

The founders Sam England and William Tildesley have represented the site at events including but not limited to:

· Internet World 2006
· Internet World 2007
· Internet World 2008

· FOWA 2007 London
· London Hack Day 2007

· BarCamp Leeds
· BarCamp Cumbria
· Bar Camp London

· BBC Backstage events

· MASHED 08
· Widgetise Brighton

· GameCamp Guardian UK

IVirtua has been Featured in podcasts such as TechCrunch UK and mentioned on radio stations in London such as Kiss 100 FM.

IVirtua elsewhere:

· Highly ranked brand on iTunes UK (Podcast)
· Members on ustream and marketing on many UK forums and communities


Timescale for sale:

Day 1: Sale is agreed and payment is cleared
Day 2: Site is prepared for sale, this means FTP password are readied, control panel passwords and also server control panel passwords readied. Domains are included and passwords for these included too.
Day 3: Site is passed over for ownership
Day 4: Support can be gained for about 2 months after sale from our Director of Operations Jamie Taylor. He can be contacted via Mobile phone, post and email. If you are a US buyer, our US representative can do a similar job.

 

I bid $100....

 

What is the monthly outgoing cost?

 

Site staff to build the staff were employed on a freelance basis.

All site staff are now volunteers, even the dveelopment team, though for major work they would negotiate payment.

The site itself can be run on any fairly low end VPS, if it is US based then it will be cheaper than UK.

Current costs are $10-$20/month though other sites were hosted on the VPS itself.

Attending events, advertising in magazines and networking with the gaming industry in the UK came at our personal expense and was mainly funded by ad revenue or our other ventures, and personal savings, or donations to the site.

This part to running the site was expensive but obviously the new owner may or may not want to do this kind of thing. We did gain special deals from hosting companies and LAN centre operators to advertise/gain cheaper hosting or VPS though networking with the industry. Included with this sale will be contact details of all those we have networked with - so called friends of the iVirtua Community, not just us, and through willing to support financially or though their own businesses.

If you would like to contact me further regarding this, PM me for my full contact deails (telephone, post, email, IM, skype), or as above i'd be more than happy to meet you if you are in the UK, or give me a ring.

 

We also rank #1 for "games industry community" and "gaming industry community" above GamesIndustry.biz:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...unity&btnG=Search&meta=cr=countryUK|countryGB

and

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...unity&btnG=Search&meta=cr=countryUK|countryGB

Page 2 for gaming community

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...icial&hs=TnO&q=gaming+community&start=10&sa=N

 

Any incoming revenue at all. I may have missed it in the post.

 

Adsense: around $100 per week variable
Kontera ads make $50 per week and increasing

We have a contract ready to be enacted with VibrantMedia (IntelliTXT ads) which have major advertisers and significant revenue. I will pass on details of our account manager at Vibrant Media to the person who buys the site.

Private advertisers: £3x5 ads (£15) and 3 ads @ £5 per month have been there for 3 years. - thats about another $40 per month and comfortably pays for hosting and any other small expenses.

Remember though what else you are getting - though it is a genuine revenue earner, its an online community with some high profile members of which a lot of networking work has gone in to it, with custom software and a good community alongside rich contributions.

It shouldnt be seen simply as just another low maintainance 'niche site' - to make it work it will require a bit of commitment and with some careful consideration it could be monetised with other ad schemes and with some more SEO organic traffic could be increased too. The staff team would help you with that.

 

I bid $250

 

i bid $300

 

Remember we also have the database of 4000+ users with are geotargetted and a niche audience.

They are legally OPT-IN, therefore you can market to them about other niche sites, and because they are all internet-savvy people, if you dont spam them and you and write to them properly they are almost 100% reponse rate.

We have recieved offers from larger communities and also recruitment agencies in the UK to buy the database for large sums of money, or subscribe to our database so basically they have access to it for a monthly charge - this is because there is a regular stream of users joining.

We will still be going to this years Edinburgh Interactive Games Festival in July to market the site even if we have sold it too

If you buy it, remember to look after your users well and dont treat this site JUST as a revenue earner, it has a lot of potential and revenue can probably be tripled with some simple implementation of other ad networks or some backlink creation for quick SEO. We have a massive content database with full SEO.

Thanks for bidding

 

How much works are involved on a daily basis? I'm quite interest in this but i don't know enough about the gaming industry

 

Nothing really on a daily basis, a community runs itself usually, maybe a bit of moderation but our anti spam is so good no bots ever get through.

What we do on a daily basis is market the forum. I'd expect you might work on the site as in market it more using whatever methods work for you, so basically it doesn't require any work on a daily basis more than any other site.

Additionally, the site does have a feature (which can run via CRON jobs on the server which is easily turned activated with one button) - which can import from a selection of RSS, this is for use really during times of low activity, or for the downloads section which has proved very popular.

 

Can you send me revenue stats plz?

Where about in London are you based? I'm in London too

 

I have sent you a PM, WengChun.

Any more bids? We are likely to close this soon because we have received some other high bids. (Just a heads up to anyone watching the thread)

 

$400 bid here.

 

Thank you for your $400 bid. We are currently still considering other, higher bids and propositions.

 

I am not sure the heading on your website is showing!?

 

whats the highest bid so far?

 

I'll go in at $500...

 

The highest private bid so far is $650 USD, and another offering $3000 over a period of 10 months.

What do you mean by this?

Thank you for your bid Ikaruga.