Buy Somersoft?! How much would you pay?

[Sim]

I'm not sure that a board like this lends itself to much further growth in real terms mainly because it's such a relatively small audience.
However if the owners had a 3yr, 5yr and 10yr plan for the site, they would probably have similar goals as other boards in having more members sign up and contribute more threads/posts, thus generating more traffic and page views which leads to greater advertising revenue.

Nope - the owners of the site just want it to continue to be a great resource for property investors. That was their goal when they started it, that still is their goal now.

However if it did grow exponentially, i think i'd do the following:
1) migrate to http://www.invisionpower.com/ away from vBulletin because it seems much more functional.

I disagree. IPB is good - but I don't think there is a need to migrate off vB, it does everything we need it to and is extremely extensible (have a look at what I've been able to make it to on ZooChat for some examples: http://www.zoochat.com/ ). We really aren't using the capabilities of vB to their full extent at this point. I am planning a redesign of the site sometime down the track to take better advantage of what this software has to offer in the latest versions.

2) start allowing advertising. After awhile you don't even notice it and people can opt out of viewing ads and support the board through subscribtion.

Jan and Ian have made it clear that they would prefer to maintain their independence and not rely on sponsorship or advertising. Advertising isn't the only business model available.

3) get a few more moderators on to mix it up a bit more (the current ones are good but i think some have been here too long)

Moderators come and go. It is a volunteer position and I think the moderators we have do a great job. We do ask new people to join the team from time to time.

5) create a sub forum for shares and managed funds.

Jan and Ian have made it clear that they want to focus exclusively on real estate. We tolerate discussion of shares and managed funds in the off-topic area (Coffee Lounge), but would prefer people focus on property. There are plenty of other discussion forums out there which cover shares and managed funds.

6) allow greater freedom of speech in the coffee lounge -- this place should be virtually anything goes as long as it's not racist, threatening or libelous.

The coffee lounge already does allow you talk about just about anything except where it goes against the forum rules or covers one of the few taboo topics we have on this site because (from nearly 10 years of experience on this site) they always end up breaking the forum rules.

 

[newhigh]

Jan and her hubby have done us a great service by creating this site.

But they must have costs that they have incurred to keep this website going. I'm curious as to how much it costs to keep Somersoft alive?

Even mods need to eat.

Who pays?

Are the sums involved token or large?

 

[Sim]

But they must have costs that they have incurred to keep this website going. I'm curious as to how much it costs to keep Somersoft alive?

Even mods need to eat.

Who pays?

Are the sums involved token or large?

I won't go into details on the costs - Jan and Ian currently pay all operating costs out of their own pockets.

 

[Aaron Sice]

my website is worth $58 USD....

 

[moyjos]

My site is $29

Holy !!!!!!!! look at facebook!!!!
"facebook.com" is worth $2,608,293,278 USD

beats Bill Gates out of the water..
"microsoft.com" is worth $82,769,901 USD

even Obama is worth S!!T
whitehouse.gov" is worth $872,516 USD

fun to play

 

[Belu]

Sim - without going into costs are you able to give some idea what the data requirements for the server are please? i.e. space and bandwidth used?

Cheers

Ben

 

[Bill.L]

Hi all,

my website is worth $58 USD

No it's not.....

bye

 

[Sim]

Sim - without going into costs are you able to give some idea what the data requirements for the server are please? i.e. space and bandwidth used?

I'd rather not go into specifics.

 

[HomeBuyAU]

These type of website online appraisal tools are just gimmicks, as others have mentioned the prices are way out of sync.

If anyone is interested to valuate a website you would need to look at several things:

Domain Name; compare similar domain name sales, NameBio offers this service free: http://www.namebio.com/
Other places to check for comparable sales might include Sedo.com, Sitepoint.com, Ebay.com and NamePros.com

TradeMark/Company: Does the website/domain incorporate as part of a company and their trademark? Will the company or business be part of the package in the sale? One way to compare on high priced domain sales is to use something like DNJournal: http://www.dnjournal.com/ytd-sales-charts.htm but there are a lot of other sales of companies with the domain name/website having a major role in the revenue earned.

Revenue: How much income does the website make each year? This will be one of the major factors in the price unless the domain name is a top one word .com.

 

[attrill]

The nuggets of information I have picked up on Somersoft that I have been able to verify and then use in my own property investing would have been worth more to me than I would care to count.

Jan and Ian are the best!

 

[steveadl]

my website is worth $58 USD....

My site is $29

My sites are worth $0.

 

[RumpledElf]

Mine are worth $5800 (which gives it a VERY high yield), $130 (an even higher yield), $20, $0 and $0.

 

[geoffw]

I thought I was the only one ;-)

I thought that there would have been a huge demand from companies selling subs in Belconnen.

 

[Piston Broke]

Jan and her hubby have done us a great service by creating this site.
But they must have costs that they have incurred to keep this website going. I'm curious as to how much it costs to keep Somersoft alive?
Are the sums involved token or large?

The cost would depend on where the site is hosted.
It's run pretty bare bones, but a wild guess would be 20-30G mth of bandwidth and 4-5 gig of HD. Of course that may be way off the mark lol.
These days it don't cost all that much.
The real cost is time and effort.

 

[geoffw]

The cost would depend on where the site is hosted.
It's run pretty bare bones, but a wild guess would be 20-30G mth of bandwidth and 4-5 gig of HD. Of course that may be way off the mark lol.
These days it don't cost all that much.
The real cost is time and effort.

But don't forget that high quality professional paid technical support also costs.

 

[Piston Broke]

But don't forget that high quality professional paid technical support also costs.

I don't see much need for technical support on a site like this other than updates and adding or subtracting modules, which is not all that useful for this type of site.
Sure someone has to msg the hosts (I put that as part of the time & effort) when the site goes offline or there is a glitch, but I have a vB site doing >30G mth and technical support is rarely needed in my case. I just update it now an again, and it just keeps going.
I'm not at all discounting running a site like this, just pointing out that time & effort involved makes the cost of machinery & computers insignificant in comparison in my experiences.

 

[Sim]

just pointing out that time & effort involved makes the cost of machinery & computers insignificant in comparison in my experiences.

You are quite correct. The cost of hosting is relatively small compared to the overall cost of managing the forums (by which I'm not referring to just the technical aspects of operating a website).

 

[our obsession]

I think it would be a great idea to utilise commercial addy to offset costs, no opposition at all. IF it was being considered.

Also would still pay if it was membership, voluntary or subscription, is tax deductible and no different to buying a copy of API.

Terrific tool and resource.

 

[Sim]

The cost would depend on where the site is hosted.
It's run pretty bare bones, but a wild guess would be 20-30G mth of bandwidth and 4-5 gig of HD. Of course that may be way off the mark lol.
These days it don't cost all that much.
The real cost is time and effort.

True - the site costs a lot less to host now than it did 7 years ago - especially given the growth in traffic and bandwidth usage.

Interestingly, one of my other sites (ZooChat) which sees around half the monthly traffic that Somersoft does, uses roughly 4-5 times the amount of bandwidth - mostly due to the extensive photo galleries (70,000 photos and growing rapidly).

 

[stumunro]

one of my other sites (ZooChat)

Where animals connect?