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.

eBay is now only accepting PayPal for online payment – citing that your 4 times safer using PayPal than any other payment method.

Which is bullshit, it’s so easy to receive goods and then reverse a payment on PayPal it’s not funny, it’s so hard to get your money back from people who reverse charges for a bullshit reason it’s crazy.

This is just another move from eBay to jack up its stock price and profiteer since their stock has been crashing over the last few months – well years overall (it was almost $60 in 2002, $40 4 months ago and about a week ago it was down around $25).

It wasn’t too long ago they raised their percentage fee from like 3% to 10% in one hit, they make shitloads off PayPal as it is and locking every other payment provider out of the eBay market isn’t just a monopoly within eBay, but it’s unfair trading as a whole.

So much commerce is done via eBay now days that there needs to be other options for people who don’t want to pay through PayPal – either with an account or with their credit card.

Google is desperately trying to gain some traction with their Google Checkout, but it’s getting nowhere because of moves like this, if you could use Google Checkout on eBay I’m sure heaps of people would be using it.

If you havn’t read my last post about entrecard, feel free to do so now so you can understand the context in which I’m about to abuse entrecard about.

This is just an example of the bullshit that’s happening over their new pricing of advertising on sites.

Really bad sites with nothing to offer at all are now at a weighted cost of over 4,000 credits…

An example: http://sfi-income.blogspot.com/, http://seeds-of-dissolution.blogspot.com/.

Now not only have they screwed their pricing structure, but by also allowing ads to go that high they have totally ignored the value of their credits and how much time it takes to earn credits, it’s now like living in north korea where the simple things are expensive and the expensive things are government provided to special people.

Few more days I’m giving them to sort their shit out before I jump ship.

Also, entrecard, if you read this and my last post – I’m available to consult.