Selling International City Portal / Marketing platform based on vBulletin 3 Community Platform (PHP)

Why are you selling this site?
In 2014 the project was closed due to business model failure. The platform is very well develop and contains many unique and extensive features, such as a business guide + management system based on Google Local Business API and much more (social media management etc). It may be valuable for a party interested in creating a high quality international city portal.

How is it monetized?
The sale consist of the source code and design of the platform without an active site or social media accounts. There is no revenue, but revenue could be generated with advertising, for example Google AdSense.

Does this site come with any social media accounts?
No. It did have many social media accounts in The Netherlands where it grew to over 500,000 readers. The social media accounts were given away to the hundreds of social media editors who managed the platform before it was closed in 2014.

An example: https://www.facebook.com/ihvutrecht

How much time does this site take to run?
Full time. However, the platform has been made so that it can be managed with thousands of editors, hundreds of countries, millions of cities and billions of linked geographic data with a single manager. For example, the platform contains a professional social media editor management system and social media editors / website content editors can login to their panel and have access to unique marketing tools such as for example city based e-mail with (city) optimized template based replies (e.g. -> Press Release -> reply to convert to a paid press release or tailored marketing service by the social media editor)

The social media editor login/panel offers access to a list with website content about a city from diverse sources such as news papers (Google News), RSS feeds and social media. The editor can then select items that highlight beautiful aspects of a city for distribution on all social media of a city, with the ability to tag companies and other unique social media marketing tools, to gain virality on social media.

The social media editor panel also enables editors to create an invoice so that they have the freedom to sell tailored marketing services to local businesses, and receive a commission (e.g. 80% of the invoiced amount).

The admin panel that controls it all, can be managed by 1 person effectively. There is total overview and control, and it is professionally developed. The core is vBulletin, a well developed platform that has been in use by forums with millions of daily active users. It offers many well developed community features that are available for the platform (for every individual city).

Some features:
- the platform is designed to store information about a city in any language, also complex such as Chinese (professionally). The advantage is that a platform that is managed in Chinese, will enable access in other languages for a unique authentic touristic information platform.
- each country, city and language can be assigned a custom domain, e.g. "iloveamerica.com" + "ilovenewyork.com" + "jetaimenewyork.fr" (france) + "ichliebenewyork.de" (germany) + "small-town-name.jetaimeamerica.fr" (small town subdomain for country, with France language)
- template management: each country city can have a localized template, based on a parent-child template structure with online management (no FTP access required, vBulletin template management)
- professional optimization: Google PageSpeed 100 score for every page, advanced optimization management to enable to serve millions of active visitors with a single high power dedicated server (optimized on every detail, both PHP and frontend). When converted to a cloud environment it will result in the lowest usage costs.
- database structure to handle billions of linked geographical data with instant (millisecond) access times
- unique event calendar / agenda platform
- unique local business popularity ranking platform, e.g. "Top 100 Bicycle Stores", "Top 100 Restaurants" etc for each city and per country or region, based on social media popularity, among which the Klout score and mentions in news items (advanced, potential to enhance the algorithm). The list shows arrows (up/down) to illustrate movement in the rankings (like old top list pages) and history (social media history, Klout score etc.).
- unique effective web crawler system to crawl news sources. An async php system uses server resources to it's maximum capacity so that the server will never go down. It is also used to gradually distribute social media publications in which a timing system can be used to time publications for maximum publicity. The crawler parses a meta structure from multiple sources such as news paper items, RSS feeds and social media that can be used to extract information regarding the popularity of for example a local business or other aspects of a city.

What challenges are there with running this site?

It requires advanced PHP and vBulletin knowledge to use the platform to build a city portal with high quality services. It provides in a very high quality and feature rich foundation, but it requires a significant effort to build a portal / services on top of it. Besides technical development, it will also require a unique concept / commercial insight.

 

$20,000 for a site with zero revenue? And looks like all the site does now is display a graphic. Is this on the level?

 

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for your reply! There is no active site or revenue, the sale is for the technology and the design.