Selling Tennis forum website for sale

I'm offering up for sale my tennis forum website which has been online continually since 1998.

The site, TennisW.com, was actually online a few years longer than 1998, although my domain registration shows since October 1998. Shortly after I registered TennisW.com back then I had learned that the domain was previously owned, used for another tennis website publication for some time around 1994-1996 or so. I wouldn't have noticed if it had not been for the fact that I registered the domain and immediately had traffic.

From 1998 to around mid 2003 I simply had a java chat room on the site along with a variety of tennis related links. The chat room was pretty much the primary focus of the site back then.

In the summer of 2003 I decided to move the site to a community format with the vBulletin forum software. TennisW has been operated continuously as a forum since that time.

TennisW has been mentioned in a number of books over the years, mostly Internet directory type books. The oldest I have seen was an Internet yellowpages from back in 1996 or 1997. Last year I started making a list of all the books I came across that mentioned the site. So far the following books are the ones I've seen, but there are others:
- The All-New Book of Lists for Kids
- Que's Official Internet Yellow Pages, 2005 Edition
- Internet Directory for Teachers
- Que's Official Internet Yellow Pages, 2006 Edition
- More Reading Connections: Bringing Parents, Teachers, and Librarians Together
- Internet Kids & Family Yellow Pages

TennisW.com was never a primary focus for me but rather more of a hobby. I started the site simply because I liked playing tennis and also consider it a good & fun way to exercise.

As of the time of this post the site has the following membership stats:
Members: 9,212
Threads: 3,049
Posts: 14,009

Site traffic since June 20th of 2008 has been 382,314 unique visitors and 956,051 page views. For the past 12 months (with the remaining time in September estimated): 93,000 unique visitors and 165,000 page views. Here's the breakdown of the past 12 months:
This Month 8,612 5,595
Aug ’11 5,651 2,519
Jul ’11 14,437 8,556
Jun ’11 19,658 13,098
May ’11 16,879 10,439
Apr ’11 15,646 8,765
Mar ’11 15,955 8,897
Feb ’11 13,370 7,231
Jan ’11 15,721 8,988
Dec ’10 12,139 6,505
Nov ’10 7,900 3,074
Oct ’10 13,959 6,723
In the stats above, the numbers to the far right are unique visitors and to the left of that are page views. These stats come from the haveamint.com stats script which is installed on the same server account as the tennisw.com website itself. The stats script is called via a javascript in order to avoid counting bots & spiders as most of those do not use javascript. Quantcast stats are also available at quantcast.com/tennisw.com (I'm not sure what causes the discrepancy between haveamint.com and Quantcast stats.) For the past 10 years the annual unique visitor count has been in the range of 100,000 to 150,000 each year.

Revenue has been fairly minimal, mostly due to the fact that I don't focus much at all on the website. Earnings have probably been around $1,000 in the past two years. A few hundred was from a major tennis manufacturer, via their marketing company, 100 from someone who wanted to promote their blog and the remaining $600 or so from the tennis jewelry advertiser which is still on the site.

There are quite a few other tennis forums online which are much larger and more active than TennisW. This is probably at least part of the reason why TennisW has remained relatively small. Well, that and the fact that I don't spend much time working on the site.

I believe this site would be most valuable as an acquisition to small or medium size online tennis stores. The forum could easily be integrated into the store's brand/domain using something like forums.yourtennisstorename.com to host the forums on and redirect all the traffic from tennisw.com to the main store site or a splash page with a link to the new forum address as well as links to the online tennis store. An extra 100,000 to 150,000 visitors per year I believe would provide a very nice boost to any tennis shop trying to make it in this economy. In addition, already established traffic will help build the forums even more, which would in turn also benefit the online store portion of the site.

Along with online tennis stores, acquisition by someone just starting out in the online tennis publishing sector would be a great fit as well. There are many benefits that come along with having a long established domain & site. Someone who has a lot more passion for tennis than I do could probably take this site to much higher levels without having to build a site and market it from absolute scratch. What TennisW.com would do here is save you countless hours or investment to get to a similar level of traffic, etc. Keep in mind, the forums can be moved to your domain & the tennisw.com domain can be used to funnel traffic to your website.

Domains:
In addition to TennisW.com I also have the following domains which optionally can be part of the sale.
- TennisMessageBoard.com
- TennisMessageBoards.com
- LetsTalkTennis.com

My reason for wanting to sell my tennis website is pretty straightforward. The site is not my primary focus, I don't work much on it, I never seem to have much time for the site, I like tennis but do not have a significant "passion" for it and I have some debts that I'd like to pay down if a sale goes through.

Please send any offers or questions to me via private message or by email using the contact link on tennisw.com

The vBulletin license can be optionally included, as long as vB license transfers are permitted. If a sale is agreed upon the transaction will be processed via Moniker.com or escrow.com domain escrow services.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading through all the info and considering my sale.

 

What's the asking price?

 

Any revenue stats?

 

I believe the Op stated

 

I don't have an exact number in mind but my general range is low 5-figures.

DP member snooks posted a quote of what I mentioned about revenue in my first post.

 

No offense, but are you sure about 5-figures? Or you meant 4-figures?

 

No offense taken, I know everyone has a different way of valuing sites. With TennisW what I'm focusing on regarding value is the long time trend of 100,000 to 150,000 uniques per year and what it might cost a tennis business to bring in that level of tennis related traffic to their website. My guess is that tennis businesses probably pay anywhere from 10 to 50 cents per click, which would make TennisW's level of traffic quite valuable. An added benefit is that the traffic is not one-time but continues year after year.

Regarding the price, 5-figures is correct. But at the very low end of that range. I might even consider high 4-figure offers as well.

 

You do realize that 150K/year is not really that much... there are sites you can find for the mid $xxx with that number of targeted visitors each month.

Also, even with your valuation method as mentioned above, 150000 visitors per year x 3% CTR x $0.50/click is still only $2250.... nowhere near your $xx,xxx valuation, even when being generous with CTR and cost per click...

My only advice is that you look around at this forum and see how sites and traffic are valued. I think you may need to post it somewhere like Flippa in order to get close to where your asking...

 

hi, this sounds like a great deal. I would love to buy this site, but dont have that kind of money for this at the moment, I am in marketing, so I know what could be done to make money with the site, but more than that, I would like to create a model for this area I am in and use it nationally. its tough sometimes to get tennis players together at all the player locations into groups and to get organized. anyway, will be thinking about it.

Greg