I just received an email from the administrators of DomainState.com, a domain forum that is now for sale. The owners have decided to sell it via auction on the site, which will be held January 13 – 15, 2010, starting with a $10,000 bid. My bet is the auction will result in a sale between $20-30,000.
Here’s the email I received:
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Thanks for your interest in the site, please note the following information about the sale,
General site info:
Started: 12th Sept 2002
Vbulletin Version: 2.2.7
Total members: 12238 registered and confirmed
Total posts: 480,595
Domains included: domainstate.com, domainstate.net, domainstate.org.
Revenue: currently unmonetized
Traffic stats: We haven’t kept stats as that wasn’t something of use to us how we ran it at the time but that as several people have asked for them we are adding in Google analytics. Obviously the amount of stats available before the sale will only be around a weeks worth.
Note also we currently block google from crawling the site via robots.txt.
User registrations:
Dec 2009 – 127
Nov 2009 – 109
Oct 2009 – 110
Sep 2009 – 116
Post numbers:
Dec 2009 – 1490
Nov 2009 – 1940
Oct 2009 – 2192
Sep 2009 – 1859
Other details: Vbulletin has been modified with some hacks (whois, showcase etc). You may or may not want to keep those features.
Bandwidth usage:
September 09 – 1.25gb / 10.02gb (In/Out)
October 09 – 1.21gb / 9.07gb
November 09 – 1.32gb / 9.92gb
December 09 – 1.01gb / 8.01gb
Method of sale:
Due to a fairly large number of inquiries we have decided to sell the site via auction. The auction will be on site but will not be publicly viewable and bidders will be asked to provide contact details. It will be held in a private section of the site that only bidders will be given access to. Bidders will be screened and we reserve the right to refuse any potential bidder.
A list of the usernames and real names of each bidder (but not contact details) will be available to other bidders in an effort to make the bidding process as transparent as possible.
The auction will take place from Wednesday the 13th to Friday the 15th of January 2010 (48hours) starting at 12pm EST (eastern standard time) ending at 12pm EST on the 15th.
If any prospective bidder is not a current member of the site they will need to join.
The starting bid will be $10,000 USD and increments need to be $500 or larger. Bids under $500 will be deemed invalid. There will be no reserve.
If a bid is received within the last 10 minutes of the auction the auction will continue until 10 minutes after the last bid. (example if a 2nd bid is received that will extend the auction for 10 minutes after the time of that bid).
We reserve the right to extend the period of the auction if the site experiences downtime during the running of the auction.
Other terms:
Posts in the administrators section of the site will be removed before transfer. (approx 17,000 posts).
Payment needs to be made within 3 business days of the conclusion of the auction.
Method of transfer:
The successful bidder will be required to move the site to their own server/hosting account within 2 weeks of receipt of payment.
After receiving payment we will immediately work with the buyer to transfer the domain names and the site.
We will do everything we can to make sure a stress free transfer is achieved from our end but the purchaser is responsible for the setup of the site on their end. We suggest bidders become familiar with the method of transferring a vbulletin forum.
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/moving_servers
Please note also the site is currently administrated and moderated by the three owners and we won’t be continuing in that role after the sale.
Please respond to this email stating you domainstate username, real name and company name (if applicable) and contact details and we will setup access to the bidding thread for you.
For any further questions please email us,
Best regards
Paul Cotton
Paul Shaw
Matt Purtell
Domainstate Admins
