The business side of Sciforums

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Syzygys, Jan 16, 2008.

  1. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    A couple of questions for starters and owners, moderators feel free to jump in with info:

    1. The main purpose of Sciforums (for the owner) is to make money, correct?
    (I could be wrong, that's why I am asking)

    2. How much Sciforums worths approximatelly? How much the owner would sell it for, let's say tomorrow?

    3. Renting the servers annually cost only like under $2000, correct?

    4. At least one administrator (Plasma) is paid for his work by the owner. Is he a fulltime employee?

    Now it is possible that the ads are just for covering cost and Sciforums is really trying to be a not for profit but for humanity's knowledge and spreading the truth. So somebody with authority could you please answer these questions?
     
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  3. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    I'm sure the advertisements are just there to perhaps lessen the cost for running the place along with advertising the forum further. (Yes, those adverts can actually aid Sciforums search rank)

    Online advertisement is not as lucrative as some people might think, it's all dependent on which advertisement company you use and what contract you agree to, along with actually having a number of hits.

    Some companies require their adverts to be on every page, they'll pay a very low amount per advert but only if the links are followed by physically clicking and they will only advertise with websites that get say 10,000 hits daily, there also make sure that you can't claim your money for adverts shown until you've reached a particular figure, say $50. (at say 0.0003 Cents per advert it would take a while to get there). Those companies are usually Middlemen, they are making their money by generate all those tough rules for sites administrators to follow.

    In truth if a site owner wants to make money from advertisement, then they better make sure they have the traffic and then approach companies that deal with the genre that they deal with, so those companies sponsor them directly. No middle men means it can be cheaper for both the company paying out for adverts and more revenue for a site owner.

    What is Sciforums worth?
    Sciforums is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, after all the domain is just a name leased from particular companies that deal with the TLD's. If you were to look at the physical factors then you could work out it's base worth by:

    • Price of previous sale (On relevant if it exchanged hands, rather than being returned to the pool of available domains and then reused)
    • Price of Domain name per Annum
    • Cost of Server rental per Annum (If it's own Rack, then Maintenance and Administration costs apply)
    • Cost of Software per Annum
    • Cost of Maintenance and Administration of Software
    There are then factors that can increase the price:

    • The Age of the domain name
    • The stability of the site (Has it always been a particular way or has it been open/closed and changed it's function over the years?)
    • Whether the domain domain itself covers a particular purpose. (For instance a general site for someones personal webpage won't get as much traffic as a specialized site, however it will gain more potentials for obscure search engine hits, but only if the Markup is done properly in regards to the websites scripting.)
    • Whether the domain name actually states it's purpose in its name.
    • How well the current site is in regards to Markup standards
    • How well known is the domain in regards to search engines.
    • Whether a business is being sold with it.

    There are many sites that try to factor this all in and give a price, however most of them aren't that good at evaluation since as mentioned previously it's only worth as much as someone is willing to pay. Obviously a person would have to pay more for functional software, previous site layouts, Logotypes, copyrights and they would pay less if it was just the domain name they acquired.

    Renting the servers annually cost only like under $2000, correct?
    Renting a Dedicated Server costs more than a Shared Server, it has it's perks and it's drawback depending on where it's situated. With Shared servers if you have multiple sites with high traffic on it, it can mean creating a DoS (Denial of Service) for all sites just because the load is high. Obviously the software has balancing measures but there is only so much balancing the contention can take before you start seeing the 'Sorry, this server is busy please try again in five minutes' messages.

    A dedicated server located in a rack on a backbone obviously costs a fair bit more than one run at home, however you have the whole backbone network to stabilise your load so again you don't suffer from DoS. The metaphorical explaination of this is imagine having a road with 5 lanes, running a server at home is like forcing those 5 lanes to one lane, where as on a backbone there potentially many more lanes to travel. (Admittedly they cache 'common' pieces of data, like for instance caching images and identifying what's popular to make it readily available rather than resulting in a DoS)

    There is then the cost of Bandwidth, usually most companies that do hosting or rent rack space tend to have a set amount of bandwidth in their charge with any extra over that limit being charged per Gb. In essence if sciforums was truly about making money then there would be a whole ergonomic discussion on how to lessen the bandwidth usage which would have resulted in a far stricter method of moderation employed by the administration.

    Obviously some questions you've asked I can't answer because I don't know, however what I have answered is based on what I know through my studies of being a web administrator (I rented a Dedicated once upon a time, dabbled with the advertisement companies to assess how much a person actually doesn't earn from a website etc)
     
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  5. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks for your response. Still waiting for the rest from let's say Plasma, although I have a feeling he/they might don't want to discuss it.

    I had a similar thread on evaluating websites, so yes, I knew about how difficult it is. Message boards like this is basicly just a platform and not a content provider, meaning the content of the website comes from the users and not from the owner. Take away 10% of the most active/valuable users, and the website's value drops greatly.

    I was thinking the same as you, that ads are there just for supporting the cost, but then it was implicated that Plasma is a paid administrator. The other website I visit has no paid moderator, but makes pretty decent money from non-aggressive ads. We don't know how much, but minimum 2-300K per year. That is a decent amount for basicly just providing a platform...
     
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