Forum Moderators: phranque
The buyer in question runs a large ecommerce based site on the same topic(s). He is looking for a way to increase his presence on the net.
Google has been hitting my site HARD lately, currently google indexes less then 1% of the content on my site. I expect to have 22,000+ pages in the next index due to a more googlebot friendly design.
Anyhow, back to the subject. What is a community worth? The community in question is very well behaved, somewhat like webmasterworld, with thousands of pages of great content and information.
I do not sell advertising on the site, so i cant sell based on previous revenue. I have taken donations in the past, and have also sold jerseys to pay for hosting.
I was thinking that selling on a "$X per member" may be the best, but what is a member worth? I have 800 that have never posted, I have a handful that have posted thousands of times, and hundreds that visit the site daily.
Help! :)
My e-commerce site has community elements in it and it is one of the main growth drivers - happy members talk, talk, and TALK about your products.
Thus, the value of the community is higher for the e-commerce site than for you and its price should not be based on past revenues, but on its potential to generate future revenues.
An average member recommends the community to 3-5 people (in my case). The pricing question could be formulated like: how much is the e-commerce site willing to pay if they want to be recommended to [number of members]x[average recommendation number] potential clients?
If I were you I would explain them this logic and let them to come up with the number. (They probably know their conversion rates visitor/registered client/revenue/profit and can calculate the expected future revenue increase from taking over your community.)
I would like to know how it goes, if you don't mind, sticky me the results.
I love running the community, I have made so many friends over the years. It's just that i am starting a new project, and will not have the time needed to run the community correctly.
>registrations
I don't feel it is a read good metric or indication activity. We've had somewhere around 75k signups here and I constantly expire member accounts back to 60 days active members. That leaves us around 10k logins a day plug the lurkers and drive bys. You don't want padded reg numbers - you want active members.
It really all depends on your industry though.
Scott
I really like the blue widgets with the fuzzy orange widgets
Then the forum's software's filter does find and replace for products in their store and links them to the products. suddenly blue widgets becomes a link to the blue widgets on his store. ;) I see a lot of value and potential. I am currently doing a site in this matter with an affiliate program though since i dont own the actual products ;)
If you sell someone a community that isn't making anything (I didn't check your profile), and they plan to acquire it and continue the status quo, that has a low value. If they plan to acquire it and start charging a fee, then figure out what percentage of members are going to stick around, multiply that by the fee, and figure out the present value of that stream for the next 3 or 5 years, minus the value of the time it will take to upkeep the community. If they plan to charge a fee, and also plan to see what else they can get out of those members by sending them to their other sites, or sending their visitors to your site, that's still more value. But then subtract value of the overlap between their sites and your sites.
I don't know how responsive people would be to that.
Plus introducing that kind of system in an existing community may have a detrimental effect.
Imagine if WW starting doing that? :)
What I was thinking was that a widget-business could buy a widget-forum and intergrate it into their customer service strategy and use it to add value to their existing site and also discretely plus sell their products.
One possibility couls be to add a side bar and include keyword based content ads for the widget-business's products.
The change would be noticable, but not too intrusive. Most people would get used to it.
A simpler method could be a static side bar of ads that could be rotated from time to time.
I think that forums can be useful for certain industries - ones that have a lot of new developments.
A computer game forum would be a good purchase for the maker of the computer game - the users would be pleased about the inside knowledge and the business would increase loyalty to the brand.
Scott :)
If WebmasterWorld did it? Think if Google Adwords had an affiliate campaign and all the others did for submission I'm sure there would be a chunk of change lying around somewhere. However this site is different than others just in it's nature.
A site that would match up with an ecommerce site, products sold by the same guy would go over more trusted. Because its a store that he would own maybe on the same domain maybe not but it would directly linked and branded. I see true potential for links like that within a community already established.
:) Gator was wrong for implimenting that upon the users as spyware tactics. That is done on client side behalfs not server side. Didnt matter what page on the net you went to, but on your own community it could be worthwhile.
Its gotten to the point where we stopped promoting the community on the rest of the site in order to keep the problem from happening again with new members. That dropped our uniques in half, but those who remained took advantage of the increased performance by upping their page views 40%.
So now we have a hard core group of people, where a bunch of them have outgrown the purpose of the community. 20k unique/900k pvs weekly and no real revenue. The flip side is that it is a great resource and a truly valuable service for people, which is what I think the internet was started for ;)
Be careful of valuing a community as a sales vehicle because sales may never materialize and there could be hard feelings. People who use message boards can have a realy strong sense that it is a noncommercial vehicle and can ignore attempts to monetize them very easily.
If the message board is already active then minute changes and implimentation of links slowly could do alright. Never want to over burdon a sentence with so many links because there's an affiliate for everything ;)
