3 years are over. After creating and taking care of my community since 3 years, I think it's getting time for me to concentrate on new projects and therefore to transfer the management to someone new.

My community is not webhosting targetet, it's a generic community in italian language. In terms of statistics, my website recieves about 1 milion page views per month, we have about 30,000 registered users and the website has a really good reputation. I'm sure, I know that my website will go on growing in the future.

If needed I will provide all the necessary assistence for a couple of months, and probably remain as a community manager even longer, if you wish.

To contact me please send me a private message including your full name and company name. I will of course answer any question you may have.

Price: not less than 250,000$

250,000$?

how much are you earning monthly
your monthly profit?

Well $250 000 is crazy. Lets do some basic math:

1 million pv:s a month. Say you get $1 CPM ( this is good ) on all your inventory. That's $1000 a month.

Hosting might cost, say $50. Thats 950 a month = 11400 a year.
It would take over 20 years to get the money back...

Feel free to correct my numbers, but what an buyer would need to know is monthly revenue. Based on my calculations
( I'd say a site is generally worth 6 months of net profit ) more like $5700 - also there's an added value if it's a strong community.

If you get $10000 you should be happy if you ask me.

Do your members pay for a monthly subscription?

250,000 is pretty steap... the people above are right. It would take forever to recover all that. I'd say around $100,000 if you're lucky as well.

your calculation is absolutely correct but you did not think about the most important factor... 30,000 well profiled users. 30,000 users which can receive emails from you, which will (a lot of them) participate in every sort of permission marketing activity, which will be disposed to give even more personal information if requested... and... last but not least.... this registered users could become your customers.

The community was born to entertain people and not to become rich. Therefore the community is sort of "virgin" because we have never tried to sell anything and we did never send more than 1 massmail per month (only informing about the enhancements or new features of the website itselfs).

Any service or product offered by the new manager will not be "binned before taking a look at it", simply because the users are not used to be "bombed" with offers by us. This means having an excellent reputation and the chance to associate the entire website to one product.

Another thing I'd like to mention is the fact, that the community is free - while some "competitor" did already start asking about $20 for 3 months for the same service. I did never consider to charge the users for the service (and I will not do it because, as mentioned above, I would really prefer to start with new projects), but it could really be a way for the new manager to increase revenue (or an alternative to generate revenue).

Further, the average growth of the users is excellent, about 100 new registered users per day, and I'm quite sure this number could be easily increased....

Best regards,
italiano

Offering a "premium subscription" might be a way to make some money. Perhaps charge $1 - 10 per month for a few extra features and the removal of ALL ads. $5/member @ maybe 1,000 premium members would be $5,000 per month.

Having 30,000 does give you potential to make some good cash but I'm not sure if it's worth $250,000 unless the site is already making some serious dollar signs.

Allow me to point out...

You are pricing your site based on the assumption that, even with the added ads and marketing, the members will still stay and the signup will still be coming.

Unless all you users are truly internet virgins who has never received ads before, a significant portions of your user base could be lost, not to mention the decrease in signups.

There was a guy a while ago, who was trying to sell a redirection site based on "projected" income, but failed to realize that the main value of his site is the ad-free atmosphere. I think your site is similar; perhaps you were able to get that many users and signups precisely because you are not sending any ads.

Peter

Hi Peter,

yes your assumtion sounds very realistic and I'm sure this is the case for a lot of websites. Well, I'm sure this will not happen as long as the users are not bombed with offers and ads, as so many companys do.

The community is really strong due to the fact that there are banners on the website (since we are online) they know that we have a return in terms of money by their clicks. Therefore my users do know that the community is NOT sort of "we are here and we work for free for you".

What I wanted to say with the word "virgin", was that my users do not belong to the "bombed ones", and that there is no product associated with the website, not even a returning banner with the same product.

But one thing is sure, if the new manager starts bombing the users with offers (f.eg. 3 massmails per week), well the high fidelity users of my site will turn into the classic "oh again an email from them" users.

Well, how long do you think it would takes for the potential buyer to recover his cost given the moderate marketing you suggested?

Peter

well Peter, I think this is impossible to answer. It could be one year, less, more.... I should turn the question back to the people interested into buying a community. With the given ressources, how much time will it take you until the so important ROI?

If the new manager decides to go on, by only selling banner ads, well... I do not need to go on any further. If the company buying the community has the right product to sell on the website, it could be a matter of months.... and on the other hand, if there is a company which uses to spend a lot of money into web campaigns of any genre, it could be cheaper for them to buy an entire project than to go on buying at agencies.