There’s a forum for sale over at SitePoint, it’s actually a good forum, the url is: http://www.businessforum.net/

It’s making $0, it’s pulling over 500 uniques a day, 250,000 page views a month.

But his starting bid is $12k, and his BIN is $35k.

The reality here is that it’s over priced; it only has 7,000 members, 5,000 threads and 24,000 posts. It’s a bit, but not a lot for a 2 year old forum, so it’s been kicking along and slowly growing, but it’s not shit hot and taking off or anything. He’s put a lot of work into it, but it needs a lot more to get it really going, regardless, it is a nice foundation to start from, so it’s defiantly worthy of purchasing… but not at $12k-$35k

I think the main problem here is that he bought the site 7 months ago for $11,600… back then it has 4,000 members, 14,000 posts.

He overpaid 7 months ago for it. And he’s trying to sell it for more now, because in his eyes from the price he bought it for it’s now worth more.

The reality is that he overpaid, back then it was worth $3-4K, and now its worth about $5-6k tops.

There’s no revenue, there’s only 500 uniques a day and only 7,000 members. To really get this forum kicking and making any kind of money, it needs 20 hours a week put into it and more marketing cash invested into it, in 2-3 months you could if you’re lucky kick it up to 1,000 uniques a day, but even then from ads alone you would be hoping to bring in $500 to $700 a month. You won’t do it from adsense, you would be doing most of that revenue from private ad sales.

So after expenses, and all your time, you’re not making much. To keep it going you would be easily spending $200 a month on marketing, let’s say you profit $500 a month (after that 3 months of heavy marketing and time spent), and then you’re looking at a site worth $5k (10x revenue) probably more because there’s revenue and growth and a long history.

Still, not worth $12k minimum, if I was him, I’d spend $1k+ on promotions a month and start putting ads on the forum, sell ads for 3 months, get some revenue in and then sell, at least then you’re showing the potential buyer of the site that the investment is going to be worth it.