Originally Posted by
edman
haha, eyesonff. A year ago I asked the owners if they'd sell it. Sure. The price tag - $100,000. I lol'd. I don't think they'd ask for that now, but it would probably still be something ridiculous.
The problem of eyesonff is that every owner has grossly overestimated its worth. When Cid sold it for $25k, he and the new owner overestimated how much its worth. When the current owners now bought it for I think around $33k if memory doesn't fail me, they hugely overestimated how much its worth. It all looks so good on paper - lots of pageviews, lots of posts, big ass database. It just appears under monetized. Then you realize
1) All those pageviews come from the same people loading forum pages over and over
2) Most of the posts are just spam
2) Those who are real visitors are there to find content about a game they have already bought. They have no intention to buy anything or click on your ads.
When I contacted them, the site was already making smurf all money. When you subtract the server costs, it was making maybe $100 - $200 per month. Since then the situation in the video game website niche has deteriorated dramatically. Ringtones are making a lot lot less money (3-4 times less), and CPM ads are paying about 2 times less (there is now a slight pre-xmas increase, but January is going to be brutal). Additionally, pageviews have gone down 50% (from 1,132,000 in 07.2007 to 566,000 in 11.2008). The site received only 56,000 unique visitors in November. The way things currently stand, I'd say it isn't making any money at all. Even if it was getting traffic, scale doesn't help - I own a site that much larger than EoFF in a similar niche, and its also making close to smurf all money.
In line with that, I'd say its worth pretty much smurf all. Somebody will probably pay $10k for it because he has no idea that there is no money to be made.
It is unlikely the owners will invest further in such a site to make it come out of nothingness. Usually people like these who buy sites expect the websites to make money just like that. They are not webmasters, they don't run websites. They won't risk making a further loss by investing time and money in a website that has already made them a huge loss that they know deep within, but would never publicly admit. There isn't a whole lot going for it anyway - the site hasn't been updated for half a year, its completely missing the FF13 hype (doesn't have a section for the game at all), and it only ranks for very few keywords, so it doesn't have much SE love either. Even if it was heavily updated, it is unclear whether fortunes could be reversed.
It is unlikely the owners will sell it to anyone competent, because anyone competent knows exactly how much the site is actually worth, which is not a whole lot, maybe $5-$10k. The owners will not sell for that little, they will rather choose to hold on until its too late, or dump it on someone who is clueless.
So yeah, I'd say its pretty doomed, because it needs a full time webmaster to get it back off the ground. It cannot be done without an owner participating.
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