Advice on buying a forum

[renrew]

Hi Guys,

I have the opportunity to buy a local forum dedicated to angling.Now from my side this is something that will really benefit my new business, that sells fishing products to the various facets of angling. The forum I want to buy is the biggest locally and obtains roughly 4million hits a month (obviously not unique), now just based on that number and the fact that the owner doesnt really do any effort to attract advertisers this is what I have in mind.

1) Keep the domain name but create an online shop, i use to have a dedicated online fishing shop which i sold and we averaged 100 hits a day, so incorporating this on the forum could be a very good move for online sales.
2) I can obviously advertise my products on the forum for next to nothing gaining some decent exposure.
3) Attract advertisers and gain revenue like that

My question is how much do i offer him? He only makes R1500 per month minus hosting costs which is according to him R120 p/m

Any ideas, i would obviously like to buy it as cheap as possible!

[AndyD]

I think alexa give estimated values for websites and domains but I'm not sure how accurate they are. Link

[Just Gone]

4 million hits a month !! That is a lot of hits.

[Dave A]

4 million hits a month !! That is a lot of hits.

Yeah - I was wondering whether to say something about that. And now that you raise it...

There's a difference between "hits" as in server file requests and "hits" as in page requests. And when it comes to forum websites, the difference is huge.

A single forum page load typically produces hordes of server hits (up to 100 in some cases). So the hit count is a very poor indicator as to what is really going on when it comes to a forum website other than some indication of the load you're putting on the server.

Pageviews, visitors, unique visitors, unique pageviews, active members and post rates are far more relevant numbers to indicate the volume and nature of the traffic.

[Just Gone]

4 million hits ........... thats nearly 130 000 hits per day ............... !!! Would not think this was possible from an angling forum !

What forum is this ??

[wynn]

Is it angling as in 'Phishing' or 'Fishing'

[SilverNodashi]

4 million hits ........... thats nearly 130 000 hits per day ............... !!! Would not think this was possible from an angling forum !

What forum is this ??

It's quite possible if the forum has a lot of spam, which in turns attract more spammers and "unwanted" bots & spiders.



BUT, my advice to the OP:

If you can afford the price which the seller sets, and you're happy to take it over for that price then go for it. What you do with it then is totally up to you Find out how many unique visitors the forum gets, how many users are actually active (excluding spammers, etc) and decide how valuable it could be for you then. Generally, in the hosting business we buy / sell a business like this @ 8 month's revenue, but I've seen companies who only offer 3 - 5 month's of the revenue. The seller would also need to decide what he wants for the forum, and what it's worth for him.

[renrew]

Hi,

Thanks for the info so far, and yes i do understand that 4 million is huge, that is also why i said in my first post that it cant be unique hits. I will obviously check unique hits but as for some statistics on the site here is what is given on the forum by a component:

Total Users: 2567
Total Messages: 135983
Total Subjects: 7934
Total Sections: 10
Total Categories: 112
Today Open: 5
Yesterday Open: 12
Today Total Answer: 126
Yesterday Total Answer: 122

He said that he would take R5000 for it, so that is basically 4 months worth of revenue.
Only thing i am not sure of is how much to charge advertisers, currently they pay R250 per month, to me that sound a little cheap I was thinking of R350 a month, the next best advertising for angling is print, which costs roughly R3500 for a half page add.

Any other things i should look out for besides debt/tax issues?

[Dave A]

He said that he would take R5000 for it

Bargain!

I'd buy that site at that price without a second thought.

In fact, if you're not really interested... call me

[AndyD]

Ignore Dave, he's just fishing

[Norri]

Agree with Dave, bargain. R350 for advertising sounds reasonable to me.