A good investment - if you like renovating
I think of this site over at SitePoint as a good investment.
It’s a celebrity gossip forum, good base of members, lots of posts, been around for a long time, and has stable consistent traffic.
Makes $2k a month, the BIN is $45k, a little high for the revenue, BUT, it has potential.
Just like a rundown house that you could buy, renovate and then sell for a profit, this site could really do with a massive makeover, it’s a bit of a mess but it’s popular.
You could really make this forum a centrepiece for a larger community, mesh in a blog, celeb photos and videos, and some social aspects and it would go crazy.
Just needs some love and development.
I’m even considering buying it! It’s the kind of thing that if you know how to renovate, you can really make this site go well, you don’t have to be a marketing professional, or even know heaps about celebrity gossip, you just need to know how to renovate.
Look around at what else is popular, find some active posters from the forum and talk to them, ask what they would want to see, and see if they want to be involved in blogging or something, and go from there.
It’s pulling 350k unique a month, the hard work is done here, the traffic is there, all you need now is some development and hard work.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Just had a look, the site/forum needs a lot of work done to it. It’s stuck in the 90’s. If you could get a decent team of people together I really do think you could make some decent money.
1169 online (58 members and 1111 guests)
Guest count is ridiculously high, it really needs a news/videos site to run along side the forum. It should help get some of those guests registered. Anyway at least you know people are finding this place.
If I was you, I’d seriously consider buying it. I just don’t have that kind of money at the moment.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Yeah it’s a crazy good investment, the guest count is where they are making their money, if you login the ads are removed, but you could work out a better way to organise that, having registered members is a better solution.
also their member count is low because that’s their ‘active member’ count, they prune their database of non active members…
March 29th, 2008 at 11:59 am
But that’s it, so many visitors, if you had additional content, videos and photos seperated out into their own area, you’d have more page views and more advertising opportunities. One of the few good opportunities floating around.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I’ve just been looking at the competition, all the sites are the same. Forum based. If you get a successful blog/media/news type running a long side GossipRocks forum there’s a chance of some serious money. Look at perezhilton.com just a blog but it’s making loads.
There’s so much stuff you could do with this place.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Yeah, wrap in a blog and few other popular things and it would really draw lots of return traffic and grow. I don’t have $45k in the bank to drop on it, but i might talk to a few people and see what happens…
March 30th, 2008 at 10:07 am
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