Recently I have been in discussions to buy numerous forums, and on almost all occasions the forum owner has attempted to trick me and their readers.

If you ever consider buying a forum, this may be the most important information you will ever read.

When buying forums the activity/popularity of the forum is vital. Nobody is going to pay good money for a dead forum. So many forum owners have started editing the “users online” stats, thus making the forums seem a LOT busier than they really are.

This has happened to me on many occasions, and not once has the forum owner mentioned this, I always had to discover it myself.

So what is the problem here?

Well, to be blunt, they are trying to con you. If they can make the forum show that there are 500 users online, when really there are only 5, it is obviously going to make you happier to pay more money.

Today on DigitalPoint.com I noticed such a forum: Britney forum. If that link is not working, you can visit the forum directly at www(.)eternal-allegiance(.)com

Let’s have a look at the stats:

Threads: 75,321
Posts: 1,136,730
Members: 4,095
Moderators: 5

Fairly impressive thus far.

—————————-
March 2007
—————————-
29,645 Unique visits
143,262 Page views
7,36 GB bandwidth

This is where it gets interesting. the forum had 143k page views in March. Certainly an admiral figure, but probably about average for a forum.

Let’s compare that figure to a website I launched only 5 days ago (on a budget of zero).

date – – – – visits – pages – hits – – – bandwidth
01 Apr 2007 770 1693 15748 52.75 MB
02 Apr 2007 859 1984 18189 60.61 MB
03 Apr 2007 361 851 7497 25.47 MB
04 Apr 2007 254 600 5384 19.57 MB
05 Apr 2007 539 1251 11526 38.61 MB

So to compare, let’s use the pages figure.

Sellers forum = 143,262 Page views in one month.
My new site = average of 6379 page views per day.

There are 31 days in March, so if I multiply 6379 x 31 = 199,749 page views per month.

So my new site that has had almost no promotion, and has not had one cent spent on advertising, is getting approx 25% more traffic than the sellers forum.

Now let me tell you something that will shock you…. MY SITE DOES NOT GET ENOUGH TRAFFIC TO WARRANT A FORUM!

You heard me right. I could add a forum to my new site, but from past experience there is not enough traffic to sustain a forum.

So in summary, the sellers Britney forum is getting an average amount of traffic, forums NEED high amounts.

I visited the forum, and was expecting 5 or 6 people online. This will amaze and shock you…. how many people do you think were showing as online when I visited this forum?

Bear in mind that I have already proved that it is a fairly low traffic site from a forums standards.

wait for it…..

wait for it……

There are currently 9 members and 1439 guests on the board

1448 people are reading that forum at this exact moment in time. WOW. That is more than DigitalPoint.com, yet according to the stats, the forum is fairly quiet. The alexa rank of 467,751 confirms my thoughts.

If you are ever going to purchase a forum, please do not look at the users online section. There are many mods out there that can inflate that number to any number they want.

This hopefully will act as a warning to forum buyers and forum sellers.

If you are a forum owner and wish to inflate this figure to impress the users of the forum, that is fine. But please mention that in your sales pitch.

Thankyou.