Forums over 10k users - How much to sell?

Originally Posted by kau

Ok I will rephrase the question for everyone:

What is the minimum amount you would sell your forum for?

go to eBay.com and you will find some forums that are to be sold i'm sure...

on my side, i think that the amount a forum can be sold is related to the actual profits you make of it... if it's a free for all forum, even with 100k users, you pay for the license and hosting that will be related to it... if you ave subscriptions on your site, the value of it is related to the paid subscriptions for 2 years if the guy want to drive that car very far... this is evaluation like in the commun world.

[Kihon Kata]

Originally Posted by Carforumsnet

How is it you 100,000+ members and only 279,538 posts?? Also, why does your online list say there are 300+ registered members online and yet only 30 or so are displayed as being online?

And how is it you are getting 1000 members a day signing up? I know the owners of several large boards (steroid.com, automotiveforums.com) and they don't get near that ammount and their sites are bigger than yours.

Not calling BS on your stats, just wondering a few things. If you are really getting 1000 members a day, I want some tips lol

Prolly a little bit of imbelishment I know a few forum members who do this. It does seem strange that there are 300+ registered members online and yet only 30 or so are displayed as being online and with that little posts. Maybe they just like to come there and sit with no posting and look at the screen lol

My forum had 8 million page views this past DEC. Loving it. I think our stats are more realistic compared to the one mentioned.

Total Threads: 15,561
Total Posts: 238,259
Total Members: 13,515

[Carforumsnet]

Originally Posted by Chris M

Alot of his users may be on invisible mode

Chris

You really think 200+ registered members are on invisible mode?

As for the other stat of 1000 members registering a day, I still don't think that is an accurate count. Some of the biggest boards out there with the most traffic barely get 500 a day.

[MPDev]

How is it you 100,000+ members and only 279,538 posts?? Also, why does your online list say there are 300+ registered members online and yet only 30 or so are displayed as being online?

And how is it you are getting 1000 members a day signing up? I know the owners of several large boards (steroid.com, automotiveforums.com) and they don't get near that ammount and their sites are bigger than yours.

Not calling BS on your stats, just wondering a few things. If you are really getting 1000 members a day, I want some tips lol

Actually, I do not list all the users who are on the site as that section would be a monster to display (and significantly slows down the page load time). I use this block of code to only display users who are in a "premium" group:

                        // MDP: Do not show regular users on index
                        if ( $loggedin['displaygroupid'] != 2 && $loggedin['displaygroupid'] != 17 ) {
                            eval('$activeusers .= ", ' . fetch_template('forumhome_loggedinuser') . '";');
                        }

Right now I have over 670 registered users online - can you imagine how obnoxious that Who's Online would be to display? More than 25% of my traffic comes from overseas, so I try to keep my pages to a reasonable size.

Up until about 6 months ago when I converted to vB, I pruned posts every 90 days from my site. I've also entirely deleted one of the forums a couple of times and forced my users to start over from scratch when they couldn't follow the gudelines. I've had a forum on this site for more than 5 years.

I do not let people view IMG tags on my site unless they are registered; and I replace all IMG tags with links to the registration page telling them they can't view images and must register first. When I have this in place, I get 800-1000 signups a day (I frequently change this setting, sometimes turning off whole forums to unregistered users who then get a signup page from their Google referral).

Because I get thousands of referrals from Google a day, alot of those looking for pictures of so-and-so, its not unusual that a percentage of those would convert into signups. It's also why I have a low user-to-post ratio - alot of lurkers (which is why I don't care to list them in the Who's Online). I've been running the psistats module for about 6 hours now and have recorded over 2,000 referrals from Google in that time.

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not legit.

[Carforumsnet]

Originally Posted by MPDev

Actually, I do not list all the users who are on the site as that section would be a monster to display (and significantly slows down the page load time). I use this block of code to only display users who are in a "premium" group:

 // MDP: Do not show regular users on index
if ( $loggedin['displaygroupid'] != 2 && $loggedin['displaygroupid'] != 17 ) {
eval('$activeusers .= ", ' . fetch_template('forumhome_loggedinuser') . '";');
}

Right now I have over 670 registered users online - can you imagine how obnoxious that Who's Online would be to display? More than 25% of my traffic comes from overseas, so I try to keep my pages to a reasonable size.

Up until about 6 months ago when I converted to vB, I pruned posts every 90 days from my site. I've also entirely deleted one of the forums a couple of times and forced my users to start over from scratch when they couldn't follow the gudelines. I've had a forum on this site for more than 5 years.

I do not let people view IMG tags on my site unless they are registered; and I replace all IMG tags with links to the registration page telling them they can't view images and must register first. When I have this in place, I get 800-1000 signups a day (I frequently change this setting, sometimes turning off whole forums to unregistered users who then get a signup page from their Google referral).

Because I get thousands of referrals from Google a day, alot of those looking for pictures of so-and-so, its not unusual that a percentage of those would convert into signups. It's also why I have a low user-to-post ratio - alot of lurkers (which is why I don't care to list them in the Who's Online).

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not legit.

That's awesome man, I don't let visitors view attachments on my site either unless they are registered. That's the only way to go IMO, especially when we do show coverage from various car shows.

Instead of pruning half the member list, why not just remove the listing of members and just show how many are online. I know several larger forums that do that (pbnation and several others) and it looks very clean.

Congrats on the traffic and signups, that is amazing.

What kind of server do you have the board on? I can't imagine what kind of strain those traffic numbers put on the site.

[MPDev]

Because alot of my regulars want to know when other regulars are online - its my way of pruning out the lurkers and provide a quick reference of those who are active posters on the site (or site supporters).

It's a huge drain on my server which is why I am constantly having to tweak my setup - I run 6mb/sec all day long with peaks in the 8mb/sec common. I run on a single high end Dell server but run a lightweight server for my images directory. When I hit 1,400 users online all my sites start to suffer and when I'm in the 1,600+ its getting real slow (my other auto forum viperalley.com runs 200-300 online most of the day). I should run a multiserver setup, but I'm actually trying to reduce traffic, not increase it.

To be honest, I have too much traffic; too much of it is worthless - alot of lurkers that generate high page view rates, low click-thru to ads and eat a ton of bandwidth. We don't allow attachments in our most active board except by our models which helps. I'll generate 1m impressions for ad space a day and get < 1% click-thru - I'm sure many sites with much lower traffic generate similiar incomes with much less page views.

However, that said, it does provide alot of referrals to my paid-photography site which does convert better than banner ads - so it's not all a wash. It's just a balancing act.

[Corriewf]

Why dont you restrict access to certain forums that are popular to those with (insert number) posts?

[MPDev]

Well, that's the next step in the process in reducing traffic; but because I invite people I know and work with to participate in some of those forums adding a post requirement would be prohibitive in some cases and put a more manual process in place as I would have to manually update each invited user to a new group.

[Corriewf]

Originally Posted by MPDev

Well, that's the next step in the process in reducing traffic; but because I invite people I know and work with to participate in some of those forums adding a post requirement would be prohibitive in some cases and put a more manual process in place as I would have to manually update each invited user to a new group.

So they have to post like everyone else.... I have friends too but they dont pay my hosting or manage my site(s).

[cmiller1014]

I think value has little to do with design, members, activity or any of that. I would say its based on the ability for that site to bring in revenue. What industry does it serve, are there other competing forums, does it bring a real great service to a group of people who cannot get that service elsewhere?