Website Evalution Help

[ChrisG]

Hey guys,

I currently run a gaming news website that takes roughly an hour a day (22 hours a month) to maintain, but I've had 30+ offers from people offering to help maintain the website for FREE if you want. The website also has a forum community of 2,500+ registered members with 200 or so of them being considered "active members." The forum contains over 120,000 posts and we've been live since September 22, 2009.

As for traffic stats, we average roughly 2,250 UV per day and we've managed to hit 23,000 UV in a day as well. Most days, the standard is basically 2,250-3,500 UVs or so.

As for Organic Traffic: the website received roughly 1,000UV through Search Engines each day.

Monthly, we receive at the minimum 100,000 UV in a 30-day window and have had as many as 275,000 in a month as well.

Traffic from September 21st 2009 to August 22nd, 2010: 1,491,000 Visitors, 5,160,000 Page Views.

Pageviews range from 8,000/day to 30,000/day and we generally average 300,000+/month.

We also provide a YouTube Channel that has been running for 4 months now and has accrued 1,200 subscribers to date with pretty much zero promotional work of the channel.

Our Alexa ranking is roughly 115,000.

Currently the site has thousands upon thousands of indexed pages on Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.

I believe we're a PR5 and our Compete Rank is 90,000 or so.

Currently we're in a contract with an advertisement agency and we've made roughly $28,000 Gross, however, with the Ad Agencies 50% cut, that means our net amount has been $14,000. This was accumulated between December 2009 through August 2010. I'm confident the ad agency would remain under contract with the new owner if he/she chose to do so.

If there is any other information needed, please let me know.

Thanks for any input you can provide.

[JockP]

what do you mean by gaming news ?

was it making any money before december 2009.

What type of ads are you selling ? (placements, banners, list) etc.

[Clinton]

ChrisG, welcome to experienced-people.net

I currently run a gaming news website that takes roughly an hour a day (22 hours a month) to maintain, but I've had 30+ offers from people offering to help maintain the website for FREE if you want.

Buyers would work on the premise that they need to spend that 22 hr/ month (maybe more) themselves and not rely on free offers from unproven third parties.

Price of sites can go up sharply when there are a lot of interested buyers. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing as many buyers for gaming sites as I see in other sectors. The requirement for the owner to have some interest in the subject and manage the site would depress the price a bit as well.

The good news is that there are a few people about who are buying communities and / or merging them or aggregating their negotiating power with advertisers. They would/could pay more than the approx $20K you'd get at Flippa. Ask petertdavis if he knows any such companies

[ChrisG]

what do you mean by gaming news ?

was it making any money before december 2009.

What type of ads are you selling ? (placements, banners, list) etc.

Gaming news site similar to Joystiq.com or JustPushStart.com, etc...

The website opened on 22nd of September 2009. 17 days later, we had accrued enough traffic to meet the requirement necessary to sign with a decent-sized advertisement agency on October 12th or so.

The website made roughly $600+ in November and $50 in October (in a couple of days in October). I don't have the specific figures for these two months, but I know I received over $1,200+ in a check that covered October/November/December.

Once the new year started, we've never truly dipped below $1,000 really.

January: $1,203.91
February: $996.92
March: $2,102.13
April: $1,940.23
May: $2,006.42
June: $3,013.65 (E3 was this month)
July: $2,063.12
August: $1,500 (estimate right now -- we're currently sitting at $1,250)

These are all net figures.

We run a leaderboard up top, tower to the right and a "square" ad above the tower...sometimes the campaigns include a billboard ad that takes the place of the leaderboard and sometimes the background is changed in order to complete the "takeover" campaign.

ChrisG, welcome to experienced-people.net

Buyers would work on the premise that they need to spend that 22 hr/ month (maybe more) themselves and not rely on free offers from unproven third parties.

Price of sites can go up sharply when there are a lot of interested buyers. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing as many buyers for gaming sites as I see in other sectors. The requirement for the owner to have some interest in the subject and manage the site would depress the price a bit as well.

The good news is that there are a few people about who are buying communities and / or merging them or aggregating their negotiating power with advertisers. They would/could pay more than the approx $20K you'd get at Flippa. Ask petertdavis if he knows any such companies

Do you think it would matter if I was willing to stay on to work on the site post-sale for 6 months FREE of charge or that I'd be willing to put together a competent volunteer staff post-sale during that 6 months as well?

A lot of people think it's difficult to find a "proven" staff for a site in this industry, but it's actually ridiculously easy to find people.

[Clinton]

On very large businesses where the owner is integral to the business, he is often retained on contract and part of the price is paid via an earn out. I don't think that would be attractive to the type of buyers operating at this level. Buyers at these price points would, in my experience, be keen to have complete ownership, complete control and full responsibility. They do therefore spend more time to satisfy themselves via due diligence that all of this is passing hands and satisfy themselves that they know enough to operate independent of your involvement.

If you can set volunteer staff in place that would enhance the value of the site as the costly element of owner time is removed. However, it is too late for you. For this to impact on price you need to show a fair history of the site being operated entirely by volunteers, not just one or two months' worth.

[ChrisG]

On very large businesses where the owner is integral to the business, he is often retained on contract and part of the price is paid via an earn out. I don't think that would be attractive to the type of buyers operating at this level. Buyers at these price points would, in my experience, be keen to have complete ownership, complete control and full responsibility. They do therefore spend more time to satisfy themselves via due diligence that all of this is passing hands and satisfy themselves that they know enough to operate independent of your involvement.

If you can set volunteer staff in place that would enhance the value of the site as the costly element of owner time is removed. However, it is too late for you. For this to impact on price you need to show a fair history of the site being operated entirely by volunteers, not just one or two months' worth.

I don't think I have any intentions of moving the site prior to 2011 (due to outside circumstances), so I feel I still do have an opportunity to put volunteer staff in place, successfully. Not to mention it will age the site to roughly 16 months or so (not much, but still something) and allow the average income to show it has staying power and growth (which can only help).

Thanks for all of the input thus far.

[petertdavis]

Ask petertdavis if he knows any such companies

It's really hard to get people interested in buying in the gaming niche. The headache to reward ratio is too far out of whack.

OTOH, the advertising agency contract sounds interesting, I've never seen a gaming community site earning at that level with that traffic.

[ChrisG]

It's really hard to get people interested in buying in the gaming niche. The headache to reward ratio is too far out of whack.

OTOH, the advertising agency contract sounds interesting, I've never seen a gaming community site earning at that level with that traffic.

I actually did a lot of homework in regards to which advertising agency to approach when the time came. I looked into roughly 10-15 different agencies ranging from larger agencies (Gorilla Nation Media) to smaller ones. I also made sure to check what type of audience these agencies are commonly serving, to make sure that there would always be a solid amount of advertising campaign potential from month-to-month.

Unfortunately, a lot of mid-sized gaming websites tend to be pulled towards agencies that specialize primarily in video game advertising sales and not much else, which usually results in mediocre numbers and mediocre revenue overall.

I decided the smart thing to do would be to sign with an advert agency that rarely produced video game advertising, but instead deals with just the key demographic that I would be looking to serve -- males from 13-34 or so. This meant that I could look forward to serving ads from tons of companies like Ford, Toyota, Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dr. Pepper, etc... Which has a lot more staying power than the video game industry where companies are looking more for word of mouth through community managers than paying a ton of marketing money so that smaller sites can get a slice of the pie.

Unless you're IGN, etc...you're not going to see a lot of video game advertising sales as a website.

So, I chose a different route and it has worked really well thus far.

[petertdavis]

I'd be curious to have a look at your site and the ad agency you use. If you don't want to disclose it in public, you could private message or email me. I can't guarantee you that I can lead you to a buyer, but I for sure can't if I don't know the site, lol.

[ChrisG]

Sent.