Forum Website Price?

I'm interested in buying a big forum, it has around 200.000 members ,it's pretty active and its niche is video gaming related. How much would that cost to buy? I guess it would be pretty expensive but I just wanna have an idea on the price. Thanks.

 

First, go to Alexa and find out the forum's global rank, bounce rate and all other stats pertained to it. 200, 000 members sounds like a lot, but it can also be that the forum has long been dead. You never know. Check out their bounce rate. If it's like 60%-80% - it's a huge red flag.

Second, what advertising does the forum use to make money? With 200, 000 active members you can make oodles of money with AdSense, for instance. Are they using AdSense? Were they banned from AdSense? If they're using AdSense you should ask the owners to submit their monthly AdSense income to you, as a potential buyer. If the forum is banned from AdSense, I wouldn't touch it even with a nine-foot pole, if I were you.

Third, if the #1 and #2 are fine and dandy, find two or three reliable website worth checkers and see what range of prices they are suggesting: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how much my website worth

 

The bounce rate is around 25% and it does use adsense plus another 2 advertisers. I couldn't find a realible website price checker since most of them give different prices and some don't even check the google page rank or the number of daily visitors.

 

Ask what their annual revenues are from all sources. 1x annual revenues is a reasonable place to start negotiations for any business. If you can get annual profits number from them, you might want to start at 6-8x profits.

Note that all numbers that you ask for can be faked, photoshopped, etc., so be sure to check business references for both the company and the seller. Buying a large site for a significant amount of money requires careful due diligence on the buyer's part.

 

Lol stop going to Alexa and other pointless web sites for valuations and metrics. They can't accurately determine your Bounce Rate or even what kind of traffic you receive. The algorithms they use are ridiculous and should never be taken seriously.

Secondly, 200,000 members is NOT 200,000 active members. How many members have signed in with in the last 30 days?

As for how much you should pay.... who knows!!!! We don't know the popularity or income of the web site. All I can tell you is it's probably thousands regardless of revenue.

jrbiz is right. You should ASK for the documentation and proof in the form of screenshots but also you should do a join.me or webex screenshare so you can see the seller in real time log in to their Adsense and Webstats.