Forums vs. Blogs
Someone on DigitalPoint asked a question about blogs vs. forums. The general impression is that forums are harder to start than blogs, but are easier to keep going once they are started. I ran a quick analysis to see if that holds true. The graph below shows monthly revenue for a given level of monthly visitors. Interestingly enough, they earn about the same revenue per visitor (at least, for the sites we have indexed so far).
The second picture is of final sales price for a given revenue level. As you will notice, once you pass $500 a month in revenue, forums sell for about 15% more than blog.
So to answer the question which is better, it depends. If you see it as a long term revenue source, then do whichever one you enjoy more. If you see it as something you are building to sell, a forum will give you a higher return.
Buying Domains for Pagerank Arbitrage
I own Jotzel.com, which is an old site I used to run Scoop software (Digg-like software before Digg was around) for a business aggregator. The site has been dead over a year, but still has a Pagerank of 5, so I’ve been wondering what to do with it.
In general, I think there is some opportunity to buy domains/sites with existing pagerank and put them to better use, much the way a business can buy assets at a discount and use them for something better. So I decided to poke through the data and figure out what I should do for a PR 5 site.
Below is a quick summary of what I found.
PR 0-4
Most monthly revenue for a given traffic level: ecommerce site
Highest sale price for a given monthly revenue level: community site (does not include forums)
PR 5
Most monthly revenue for a given traffic level: blog (My gut tells me this isn’t correct, and that we just lack enough data to make a good recommendation here)
Highest sale price for a given monthly revenue level: Resource site (tutorials, free scripts, etc)
PR 6
Most monthly revenue for a given traffic level: directory
Highest sale price for a given monthly revenue level: community
I should also mention that we don’t have a ton of PR6 site sales in the database, so this data is limited.
PR7+
Not enough sales to make a recommendation.
So what this means for my jotzel domain name is that I will either turn it into a resource (maybe an article directory) if I want to get the most out of a sale in a year, or I can maximize my monthly revenue by building it into a directory and linkbuilding to get a pagerank of 6.
For Quick Cash, Try a Community Site
What kind of site makes the most money right out of the gate? I ran a screen on pagerank 0 sites, again under the assumption that most of them would be new sites. Then I graphed monthly visitors versus monthly revenue. Check it out below.
For a given traffic level, communities seem to do much better. (For purposes of our database, communities include membership sites and free registration sites.) So if you want quick cash and have decent traffic building skills, a community may be the way to go.
Flipping a Young Website? Forums May Get The Best Return.
This morning I sat drinking a cup of coffee and wondering what kind of site gets the highest valuation at an early stage. New websites are hard to buy and sell because they are unproven, so you often have to consider future potential. I decided to check it out by running a screen for all sites that have sold with Pagerank of 0. Now to be honest, some webmaster that rely heavily on Adwords traffic may not spend much time link building, and occasionally you can have an old site with a PR0, but in general, PR0 sites will be those that are relatively young.
I graphed the result and was a bit surprised. Of the PR0 sites that have sold in our database, Forums have the best valuation.
Notice the steep forum slope. Also note that blogs come in last at this level. How do we explain this? My theory is that because forums are self-sustaining, if they have any traction at all, people are willing to pay for the potential that they will become solid revenue generators and require little ongoing work. Blogs on the other hand require constant work and updating to keep the traffic coming. So the lesson here is if you want to build and flip a site quickly, try a forum, or possibly a community (the second most popular) but stay away from flipping new blogs.
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