Guide to buying forums

Over the year I’ve bought a couple of forums, and I’ve certainly learned a few lessons.

I’ll post a quick guide here:

Before you buy

1. Determine *why* you want to buy a forum - what’s your business plan? A forum could involve a significant investment of not only money but also time, and factor this into your long-term goals.

2. If you’re looking to buy into a specific business vertical, keep to that. There’s little point buying a forum on a related topic, if you’re just going to have to spend a huge amount of time rebuilding it around your preferred vertical and fill it with new posts on it.

3. Decide a budget to spend before you even go looking, and keep to it.

Places to look:

1. Use a search engine and run a few searches based on keywords to see what’s around. Top results are probably going to be the biggest (and least available) forums, but it shouldn’t take too long to identify small and inactive forums that could make a good purchase.

2. Online markets such as at Sitepoint and DigitalPoint can be a good place to look. There tends to be a lot of very over-priced and very low quality forums up for sale with a few gems, though.

Warnings on buying a forum:

1. Over-pricing

Most forums are completely over-valued by their owners and over-priced as a consequence. If you’re in an auction that’s not too much of a problem, as the bid prices won’t generally meet any significant over-valuation.

Watch out for people who have a ridiculous idea of their forum’s worth. I recently contacted a forum owner - a small and inactive 2-year old forum with no revenues (only 2,000 posts) - asking price: £50,000. Realistic price: less than £500.

As a rough guide, expect to pay between $100-$200 per 1,000 posts, depending on the vertical.

2. Registered member figures can be misleading

Registered member figures can be very misleading - don’t make these the sole basis for a purchase, because:

a. if the forum is old, around 30% of the email boxes will no longer be used

b. there’s been an aggressive increase in automated registrations by link spammers this year, especially on phpbb forums. An inactive phpbb forum with a ton of members is probably 60%-80% spammers, and worthless for email contact

3. Forum activity

Be focused on user activity - a forum with a small number of regular posting members is a forum with an actual community, and they will keep posting if you treat them well.

Also be warned that I’ve seen sellers try to fake this, by getting members to login on during the day (but not post) simply to make the forum look more active than it actually is.

To get an idea of forum activity, simply keep visiting it for a few days in a row to track the number of new posts yourself.

Note that a forum with little activity but a lot of quality posts could be a good buy - I’ve done this where I’ve bought a forum that was previously invisible to search engines, figuring that it was good quality content that would bring in lots of potential new members once search engines picked it up.

More ideally, though, you’ll want to buy forums that are already active, so that you have momentum to run with.

4. Quality of posts

This should be a big concern.

Key to this is making sure there are plenty of posts on your actual targeted topic.

For example, a forum with 10,000 posts, where 5,000 are general chat, 2,000 are introductions, 2,000 are ads, and only 1,000 are on topic, is pretty much a forum of just 1,000 posts - the rest is junk.

Also watch out for forums where forum posting services have been used. Not all forum posting services are poor quality, but most are. They fill a forum with single line posts, “me too” posts, posts which are nothing more than a link, and are generally junk.

Another form of junk is forum spam posts - some companies and individuals target forums with the same marketing message. It can bloat up a forum post count, but it’s all junk.

Low-quality junk content - chat, paid postings, and spam - is practically useless: search engines won’t care for it, and potential new users won’t be attracted to join if they see junk.

I’ll add to this article as I find more key issues to consider when buying a forum.