Established Established Photography Forum, Portfolio & Contest Website (1.25 years old)

[BeauCreative]

See this page for a complete sales brief: http://www.beaucreative.com/ffsale/

FotoFight.com
Established Photography Forum, Portfolio & Contest Website (1.25 years old)

URL: http://www.fotofight.com
Age of site (months): 15
Google PageRank: 5
Alexa Rank: 361,258
Overture (fotofight): 56
Google Pages Indexed: 47,100
Google Backlinks: 450
Yahoo Pages Indexed: 33,800

Reason for Selling:

I put this site up for sale a few months ago, and then withdrew it. The reason for this is that I am reluctant to sell because of the amount of time I have invested. However, I must sell it because I just don't have the time anymore to facilitate its growth. I am not selling for money reasons, therefor I am in no hurry.

I want to find a buyer who is ginunely interested in this site and can continue to make it grow. I will stay on board for three months to help the transition, and will explain to the members the reason for "handing over" the site to a new administrator. Note: There is a thread I created about a new design being implemented. You will be given rights to the design to use if you wish (cost me $800), but I will not be doing the work to implement it. If you choose to keep the current design, I will also explain this to the members, and I am positive they will understand (in other words, it will not affect the site negatively).

Monthly Revenue (AdSense Only):

Month: Pageviews Revenue

April 2005: 36,540 $30.31
May 2005: 94,906 $52,70
June 2005: 99,354 $43.79
July 2005: 137,994 $66.51
August 2005: 148,616 $55.25
September 2005: 107,863 $50.80
October 2005: 123,508 $52.49
November 2005: 102,617 $36.79
December 2005: 79,710 $34,88
January 2006: 83,426 $56.86
February 2006: 19.048 $9.33 (5.5 days)

Revenue Details:

Adsense is very minimally implimented. You can undoubtedly generate additional income from that alone if it was integrated better. You could also sell private advertisements, text links, and generate affiliate comissions. A big area to generate affiliate comissions would be on the individual camera pages.

Honestly, this site is a hobby for me, and the ads that are in place were only to pay for hosting, vbulletin liscence, and other services.

Stats:

Live stats: http://www.fotofight.com/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

Monthly Uniques: ~5000-6000
Monthly Visits: ~12,000
Monthly Page Views: ~140,000

Growth concerns: I have done absolutely NO promotion on this site in over a year. I only promoted it to get it started. It still gets about 3-10 new registrations per day. I am confident that with promotion, the traffic would increase.

Page view drop: In November 2005, the page views dropped from 600,000 per month to 150,000 per month. The reason for this is that I completely reprogrammed the site. When I initially created it, I wanted to protect the images from hotlinking, so each image was called from a script. This was creating a page view for every image displayed. I since removed that, so the pageviews are now actual page views.

StatCounter Screenshots:
http://www.beaucreative.com/ffsale/statcounter_1.gif
http://www.beaucreative.com/ffsale/statcounter_2.gif
vBulletin Screenshots:
http://www.beaucreative.com/ffsale/registration.gif
http://www.beaucreative.com/ffsale/post.gif

Search Engine Placement (Main Terms):
MSN:
digital photography contests #1
photography contests #3
photo contests #9
digital photo contests #3
photography contest #9
digital photography contest #5

Google:
digital photography contests #12
digital photo contests #24

Required Work:

I spend hardly any time on this site anymore because of other obligations that I have. At the minimum you would need to approve contests every few days. FotoFight has a great group of members and staff who contribute to the community, and to be honest, they do most of the work these days.

Site Features:

I just recently (November 2005) recoded the entire site to make it much more efficient. As a result, there have not been any bugs found in the past few months and I truly believe that is is 99% bug free.

The site is custom coded to run on PHP/MySQL, and is integrated into vBulletin 3.5.x

At the time of writing this, there are 2,445 registered members and 14,953 photos uploaded by members.

The site holds frequent photography contests, and the process is 100% automated.

Sale Details:

This sale is not based on the 10-12x revenue model. This is a custom, unique, and established website with a ton of potential.

The starting bid is what I need to cover losses (wasted designs), and I will probably not consider selling for less (if I hold onto it, eventually it will recover the losses).

Included in the sale is the design, domain name, programming, database, and files. You will not gain copyright ownership of the images, as the members retain the copyright on their photos. I will also include a custom website design (PSD file) which can be seen here: http://www.beaucreative.com/ffsale/design.jpg

Starting Bid: $3,000
BIN: $6,000

Additional Info:
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I will update this page with a FAQ if any question are asked.

 

[LordHaHa]

Nice

Nice site but for me the $6000 tag is a bit heavy for $50 month adsense profit.

Good luck with the sale though.

John

 

[BeauCreative]

If you read the complete page, it states that the sale is not based on adsense profit.

Thanks

 

[skyraider]

Nice site but for me the $6000 tag is a bit heavy for $50 month adsense profit.

Good luck with the sale though.

John

Did you read the sales thread, and did you look at the site? It isn't a turnkey - it's a high-quality photography site. The 10-12x revenue rule of thumb doesn't apply in this case.

Posted my question on SitePoint.

 

[BeauCreative]

Did you read the sales thread, and did you look at the site? It isn't a turnkey - it's a high-quality photography site. The 10-12x revenue rule of thumb doesn't apply in this case.

Posted my question on SitePoint.

Thank you!

If you are skyraider on sitepoint, I have responded

 

[LordHaHa]

ReaD

Did you read the sales thread, and did you look at the site? It isn't a turnkey - it's a high-quality photography site. The 10-12x revenue rule of thumb doesn't apply in this case.

Posted my question on SitePoint.

If you read what I actually said you would not have replied as such - I said nice site but the price is too high for me with such low earnings - That my slant - its not for you to tell me why I would not buy this site. It makes no difference what the site is or about - I would not spend $6000 with little immediate return. Perhaps you would but so what?

If the site was cheaper it may be something I would consider - I still wish the seller good luck

JohnT

 

[PS-NP]

I wish I had the funds. This is great site and a really nice user base you have there. I'm getting into professional photography and something like this I would be very proud of - to own. It's great, I hope this goes to the right kind of person. I'm sure theres someone out there who would love to own such a site. Don't you have any members who may be interested?

Good luck with the sale.

 

[BeauCreative]

I wish I had the funds. This is great site and a really nice user base you have there. I'm getting into professional photography and something like this I would be very proud of - to own. It's great, I hope this goes to the right kind of person. I'm sure theres someone out there who would love to own such a site. Don't you have any members who may be interested?

Good luck with the sale.

Thanks, I too believe that the right person is out there

As for one of the members buying it, I can't really believe that I would find one with the technical know-how, the desire, and and funds for the purchase. It would be great if I could though.

 

[PS-NP]

This deserves a good sale

 

[Maximus_]

Nice site. Good luck with the sale.

 

[krutoi]

nice site

btw, am currently surfing around and getting the following error when clicking on main forum links (individual post links are working): The requested URL /forums//f9-photography-discussion.html was not found on this server.

update: working ok now - hmmm