Your forum competitors.......

[dtmcl]

We've had our fair share of problems with some of our competitors. But there is an ass-hole or two in every group, you have just got to get on with it.

I speak to many of our not-so-hostile competitors on a regular basis and would even go as far as saying I regard some of them as good friends. We help each other out from time to time, I even helped one create their custom skin

 

[DaveL]

Some great posts in this thread. I'll post my situation later when I'm on a pc.

 

[Lisa]

Same here. I don't compete. But my forum isn't for profit. It's more of a hobby.

Yeah, mine isn't for profit either. I just like having forums on topics that interest me.

 

[iTuN3r]

Really don't have any competitors ! There's one big board been around for 10yrs which is focused state wise when my board focuses on small city forum within same state . Rest other small boards are on edge of getting closed since there's not a single activity .

 

[DaveL]

Heres my little story!

Back in 2007 there was a local forum where the admin started to ban members if he didnt agree with their opinion. Over the space of days lots of members found themselves banned. A few days later the forum closed altogether.

I then started up my forum and we gained quite a lot of members pretty quickly. The basicness of phpbb soon became apparent and I quickly upgraded to vbulletin.

A few weeks later the other forum opened back up, with front page news saying they closed because they ran out of money and that they had received a grant from a local councillor for £2000 meaning they could afford to keep the forum going. Heres the apparent reason why the money was needed - http://bit.ly/Ijh2zC - I think his smugness says it all really

As the years passed, peoples memories fade and they have slowly drifted back over to the other forum, meaning mine is just a shadow of its former self.

Now heres the bits that annoy me the most!

As we share some of the same members, receiving an email from the admin of the other board threatning me with legal action for copyright infringement due to a member posting on his site and then posting the same thread on mine! Needless to say I put him in his place in regards to who held the copyright etc.

Receiving a grant of £2000 of tax payers money. Reading through the application where they say the forum is for open to everyone in the local area to talk and discuss local issues. The forum is actually called a "members club" which you have to apply to become part of. Needless to say my application has been refused numerous times, despite what they put in their grant application.

Wow, £2000 - Must be a pretty nifty forum. Well nope.Infact, judge for yourself - http://bit.ly/vX8jgx So considering they received £2000 and also charge a fortune for advertising on their site I cant really see where all this money has gone.

Despite having "forum" in the name - He actually calls it a magazine, in which he is the editor.

Now I might be coming across as jealous and bitter, well your 50% right! Im not jealous, just annoyed that tax payers money could be obtained and none of the original reasons they gave to obtain it have they stuck to. The fact that the man is rude and arragant and the fact the money has basically been used to fund a private members club.

Quite a few times ive thought whats the point in keeping my forum going. I put so much time and effort into it and seem to get such little returns (members, not money). Heres my forum incase anyone wanted to have a look - http://bit.ly/LHGsc

Anyway, thats my rant over with!

 

[Jaxel]

I was actually an administrator to my forum's biggest competitor. But the person who ran the server had not been seen or heard from in many years and thus the website was floundering; it would often go down for extended period of times and had many glitches. I was the administrator who was always there, repairing the database, making sure the website was clean and running as smoothly as I could... but there was only so much I could do. When Soulcalibur IV came out, the website went down for the entire launch week.

After that I publicly announced that because we didn't have control of the server or any of the content, I wanted to get a new server and finally give us a website we deserved. The other administrators of the website took this as a personal insult, saying I was trying to usurp their power (even though I would have retained all administrators on the new website). Then claimed I was a terrible administrator because I was too abrasive to people and didn't have people skills kicked me off the staff. They didn't understand the difference between an administrator and a moderator and how much work I was doing to keep the website running.

A week later I launched 8WAYRUN.com. The whole mess with me saying I wanted to get a new server basically split the community, with people who supported me, and people who didn't. So even though my website was better, we couldn't get people to switch to it; even with the other website constantly crashing and taking forever to load. That was until 6 months later when the other website went down for 3 days during a major event. During those 3 days, the people who did not support me were FORCED to visit my website... saw how much better it was, and never went back to the old website.

I took control of my community by force, because the other in control had no idea what they were doing.

 

[Carlos]

Good job, Jaxel!

 

[System0]

I ran a popular poker forum about 8 years ago. It was pretty successful though there was one rival who was using a lot of underhand tactics to get ahead. I was using vBulletin and he had stupidly signed up to my forum using his normal username. I didn't have a problem with this even though he was clearly trying to get members. It was funny as I was polite but all my members were very aggressive towards him and told him to get away.

What wasn't funny was that I was checking my logs and saw that he was actively trying to login to my admin area. He was using vBulletin too so I'm surprised he didn't try and do this from another IP address. I thought about going down a legal route but in the end I just put it down to him being a ****.

 

[dutchbb]

Thanks to my competitors, I was pushed to keep improving my site. The result is that my site is now the most successful in the niche. I like competition, as it gives me an incentive to evolve. But I have no personal contact with the owners (anymore).

 

[Carlos]

I ran a popular poker forum about 8 years ago. It was pretty successful though there was one rival who was using a lot of underhand tactics to get ahead. I was using vBulletin and he had stupidly signed up to my forum using his normal username. I didn't have a problem with this even though he was clearly trying to get members. It was funny as I was polite but all my members were very aggressive towards him and told him to get away.

What wasn't funny was that I was checking my logs and saw that he was actively trying to login to my admin area. He was using vBulletin too so I'm surprised he didn't try and do this from another IP address. I thought about going down a legal route but in the end I just put it down to him being a ****.

I had the same experience. The same exact experience.

CODForum owner came over my CODForums after inquiring to buy his site. He spammed the hell out of my forum trying to get members to his site. He even plainfully put "CODForum.com" as username. At the same time, he was still making fun of me and my company, and I told him to stop spamming. I said his site is worthless at 3 thousand dollars for these stats:

39 active members
80 total members
221 threads
1,342 posts

I'm not the only one who believes this. I made a post at Admin Talk and a Super Mod confirmed my suspicion; I don't need to worry about it.

Anyhow, this was the CODForum owner's response:

"It obviously isn't worthless since you offered 3 thousand dollars that you don't have to buy codforum.com silly boy."

Such an egotistical person. I offered him 3k if he got to a specific number. But he was too dumb to understand that, instead he jacked up the price because he knows who I am. He knows I own a company. He was trying to be evil.

 

[System0]

I had the same experience. The same exact experience.

CODForum owner came over my CODForums after inquiring to buy his site. He spammed the hell out of my forum trying to get members to his site. He even plainfully put "CODForum.com" as username. At the same time, he was still making fun of me and my company, and I told him to stop spamming. I said his site is worthless at 3 thousand dollars for these stats:

39 active members
80 total members
221 threads
1,342 posts

I'm not the only one who believes this. I made a post at Admin Talk and a Super Mod confirmed my suspicion; I don't need to worry about it.

Anyhow, this was the CODForum owner's response:

"It obviously isn't worthless since you offered 3 thousand dollars that you don't have to buy codforum.com silly boy."

Such an egotistical person. I offered him 3k if he got to a specific number. But he was too dumb to understand that, instead he jacked up the price because he knows who I am. He knows I own a company. He was trying to be evil.

I'm a big cod fan though I'm not aware of how competitive that niche is. In my opinion, the only value is in the domain name, as the forum has very few members. Has he sold it yet?

 

[Carlos]

I'm a big cod fan though I'm not aware of how competitive that niche is. In my opinion, the only value is in the domain name, as the forum has very few members. Has he sold it yet?

It's very competitive. A large Call of Duty forum has an asking price of $14,000 and above. For example, a company bought a large MW3 forum for at least 50 thousand dollars. Put it that way.

That CODForum is worthless, though. The site doesn't have a twitter and facebook vanity name available, both have been taken by two different people, meaning you're going to be left with nothing but a niche forum. No real branding available to the person buying it. Though, to answer your question: No he hasn't sold it yet. And these are his current numbers:

3,606 Threads
17,787 Posts
5,850 Members

Guess the asking price. Take a wild guess, then go to the post I linked to.

 

[System0]

It's very competitive. A large Call of Duty forum has an asking price of $14,000 and above. For example, a company bought a large MW3 forum for at least 50 thousand dollars. Put it that way.

That CODForum is worthless, though. The site doesn't have a twitter and facebook vanity name available, both have been taken by two different people, meaning you're going to be left with nothing but a niche forum. No real branding available to the person buying it. Though, to answer your question: No he hasn't sold it yet. And these are his current numbers:

3,606 Threads
17,787 Posts
5,850 Members

Guess the asking price. Take a wild guess, then go to the post I linked to.

It's difficult to know whether that was a good price or not without knowing details of income. A forum with 50 members is worth a lot if it's clearing over a grand a month.

 

[MattW]

We've not really got any form of competition. We are the only forum out there catering for this specific engine. There are other sites which deal with the actual cars which the engine is in, which are pretty massive (most have 1.5mil + posts), we are doing really well considering where we sit in the grand scheme of things when it comes to automotive forums.
One of the big draws we have is the shop we also run, which I started on the back of the forum. We sell a unique product, and are the top result for that key word in google, so get a lot of traffic that way.

 

[DRE]

I was mod on a Desi site, then the owner closed his site, deleted all our threads etc, so I created my own site. I had previously invited over 200+ members to his site before he closed it, so some of them followed me over to my new site, the rest just went back to the old sites I invited them from like SOHH and RH. His site was vb3. When I created my new site I used vb4. I made an announcement about switching to either ninjapost or xenforo and changed my mind.

*pauses*

lmao @ my ninjapost forum still being up. http://fireside.the8thlegion.com/

Ninjapost forum software is pretty cool. I had preferred it over XenForo but it's lacking a lot of features. I think the best feature about Ninjapost is it's live thread feature. you can see when someone's creating a post or thread at the top and the threads update live. Back then, there wasn't a live thread modification for vBulletin 4 so Ninjapost was pretty enticing to me. Too bad I had no control over the back end since it's on a cloud server. I didn't even know that site was still up until I checked just now.

Anyway, my member's objected to the change so we stayed with vBulletin 4. Several months later the Desi site owner re-emerged with a new xenforo site and asked me to close my new site and add everyone from my new forum to his. This didn't make any sense to me because most of my members weren't even Desi and my site wasn't focused on one race or culture, it was more of a general chat forum. Eventually dude waged war on me and war on other Desi boards which I couldn't understand cause I'm not even Desi.

In the midst of the board war I was still a member of his site. I thought his site was awesome. I was still inviting people to his new site. When I say board war though, it was his war cause I didn't even know he was spamming my site through people's pms and profile pages at the time. I was still a noob admin and was mostly focused on creating vB4 skins and pimping out my site. I didn't really pay any attention to what was goin on like I should've but he got caught and I stopped coming to his site and inviting people.

The good thing that came out of it was because I had enjoyed xenforo on his site so much I switched over to xenforo. Now he probably thinks we're in direct competition but I made my site private recently. I personally consider a site like Facebook my competition. I have noticed that peeps I had invited to both mine and his forums back in the day are addicted to Facebook. I see the bigger picture for what it is now. Facebook is a beast. It's a monster. People are addicted to it. So for the past year I've been analyzing all the features that makes Facebook so addictive and trying to apply it to my own site.

So in other words, I don't have a forum competitor but I do consider a site that is a competitor for my member's attentions and that's Facebook. Because of that, my site's sidebar is on the left like Facebook, unlike default Xenforo. I moved the inbox and alerts to the top left like Facebooks. Even the main site is like Facebook in which you can't see anything, you just have to login and it gives a brief description of what the site's about. I thought this would hurt my site's SEO by making the site private but now I don't care anymore. I've learned that SEO is nothing if all it does is encourage people to lurk since they don't have to sign in to view topics.

 

[Carlos]

It's difficult to know whether that was a good price or not without knowing details of income. A forum with 50 members is worth a lot if it's clearing over a grand a month.

I don't think that's a good idea.

For all we know, the person selling the domain name could scam you or I by bragging about how much money he's made from ads on CODForum. And because he's not very well known to say, you or anyone on this site, for example - they don't trust his traffic numbers even if he shows a screen cap. That's just an example.

Suppose I didn't register on August 27th of last year, suppose I just registered to this site and Brogan did not put up that rule of selling and trading sites. Let's suppose I come onto this site and offered to you or anyone on this site via a thread selling to you a website that has 500,000 uniques, and that's not even the truth. But I'm selling to you that number. I would be scamming you, without you even knowing, unless of course someone else points out that the picture was photoshop'ed. Now let's suppose that the person didn't point it out? Would you buy my site? If you're stupid, yes. If you're smart, no. Because the person with common sense will smell a scam from a thousand miles away.

Especially when the person with the common sense researches what the site has. This site doesn't have a Twitter, or Facebook brandable page in connection with that site. The domain's age is also important factor here, between my domain and his - mine is the older one. So my site is worth more than his.

But, right now. You guys trust me enough to sell to you a website that has gathered 100,000 uniques over the lifetime of the analytics.

Notice the difference? I don't know this CODForum owner, I don't know what his traffic is like, I don't know how much money he's getting from CODForum, and I don't even know how loyal those members are. So, why the #@^& should I trust that $3,000 sale price? Or even $10,000 that may not even give me the same traffic numbers under his control.

You see, that 50 members is going to become useless if you buy it for $3,000. Because you spent thousands, you end up losing money. The niche is strong, but the website is useless if there isn't enough members to sustain that niche. If you spent 10 thousand dollars on a site that only returns you 50 members, you end up losing 1000 dollars per month. Unless you've got a powerful network to pay off that 1 grand per month.

Your profit margin is going to be low if you buy too much on a small community. This is without any marketing dollars being spent.

 

[DBA]

I personally consider a site like Facebook my competition. I have noticed that peeps I had invited to both mine and his forums back in the day are addicted to Facebook. I see the bigger picture for what it is now. Facebook is a beast. It's a monster. People are addicted to it. So for the past year I've been analyzing all the features that makes Facebook so addictive and trying to apply it to my own site.

Ditto.

 

[DBA]

Let's suppose I come onto this site and offered to you or anyone on this site via a thread selling to you a website that has 500,000 uniques, and that's not even the truth. But I'm selling to you that number. I would be scamming you, without you even knowing, unless of course someone else points out that the picture was photoshop'ed. Now let's suppose that the person didn't point it out? Would you buy my site? If you're stupid, yes. If you're smart, no. Because the person with common sense will smell a scam from a thousand miles away.

Picture? I would never buy a site over just a picture. Give me a reports only account/login to whatever analytics software you are using.

 

[Carlos]

Picture? I would never buy a site over just a picture. Give me a reports only account/login to whatever analytics software you are using.

What if the person tells you no? He's lying. Why? Because he's hiding his traffic numbers.

 

[mrGTB]

Worth keeping in mind also, that daily visits to your site can easily be inflated by sending content in social networking sites. Getting you tons of different BOTS hitting it in large numbers daily and very often. You would have study the traffic source close and see where exactly the numbers are coming from. So I agree, you'd need full access to any sites analytics login page your thinking of buying to judge it's real worth.

No use bragging about having "so many visitors per day" in some screen-shot taken, then it turns out 90% are just Bots incoming from Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites your auto sending threads into. That's useless traffic that adds no value to any site, and the buyer just got sucker punched!