Best way to value a forum?

I have been looking at buying a forum, and heard varying opinions on how to value one. To give some basic stats on the site:

A few years old, 500K Posts, 10K members, and approx $25K in revenue/year of which after marketing, advertising, SEO etc. they have $20K in profit. I feel I could do most of the SEO/Marketing myself which will save a pretty penny.

I have heard 1 year profit for a lot of websites, but forums are a lot less work(no content to generate), and more stable, so I thought that might be a low number. What metrics do you guys use? Any thoughts/opinions are appreciated.

Thanks

 

Websites are selling for around 10-24 months in revenue. If you already know forum which you want to buy, try to negotiate, anything below 10 x monthly revenue is a bargain.

 

If there's no other interest in the website/forum, and the owner/s definitely want to sell. Ask yourself why do they want to sell? If it's profitable, perhaps its due to a lack of time for the forums. If this is the case, look for faults, mistakes general detrimental future effects from what is currently there, and try to pull them down.

Alternatively, everyone likes money, the more we have the easier our lives are. How about a proposal? Off them 75% of the value and 5% of the profits for the next 24 months... etc.

There's many ways you could get what you want, if you push them to move a little, for a lower cost that the big upfront one that you've potentially mentioned.

 

In my opinion you ain't gonna find a good earning forum for sale.
Better start your own from scratch, is pretty hard to create a successful forum, but I'm sure you knew that.

 

Best way to value is to imagine it has no revenue and then ask yourself what you can get out of it.

Any existing revenue could disappear. Historic figures are never a guarantee for future success.

 

I like that idea. It's a good approach.

 

Ask the owner if they could rent the forum for 1-2 months and see if the sales are the same. I guess you can do something that will make this transparent enough to see either the forum is ok or not.
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