Established Question and Answer site - 82,000 questions!
http://www.questionbin.com/
Sold at Public Auction
$16,500
Bidding History: 16 bids- Started:
- Thu, Jul 15, 2010
- Completed:
- Thu, Jul 29, 2010
Website Statistics and Collected Data
Site Visibility
| Google PageRank | 5 |
|---|---|
| Alexa Rank | 65,417 |
| Links in Google | 9 |
| Links in Yahoo! | 20,372 |
Domain
| Registration Date | 16th Apr, 2009 |
|---|
Compete Stats
| Compete Ranking | 73,671 |
|---|---|
| Trust | Trusted |
SEMRush Stats
| SEMRush Rank | 299,357 |
|---|---|
| Keywords in Google | 1,338 |
Site Content
| Possible Copies Found | 4 (view) |
|---|
Question and Answer site for sale: http://www.questionbin.com
This is a typical Question and Answer site like Yahoo Answers and Answerbag. It also supports video and audio answers via red5 server (currently disabled) which makes it unique from the two. The site has a custom design created for speed of loading.
Currently contains over 82,000 questions and 79,000 answers.
Revenue Details
Revenue comes from Google Adsense and Inline Text Link Ads.
Revenue is $600 and lower from Google Adsense alone. This site earns much more when school is active and less during the summer months.
Inline Text Links generate around $5-$70 per month.
Traffic Details
April 2010 Traffic Stats:
Searches200,623+73% Direct / Bookmark23,870+76% Links4,216−40% Social media431−64% Email75+29% RSS readers18−49% Advertising10%
Please note, I do not use Google Analytics. I use GetClicky and can provide seriously interested people with public stats. Please do not waste my time requesting stat access if you are not serious about bidding.
Does this auction violate the Flippa Terms and Conditions? If so, please report it.
Comments 39 public, 0 deleted
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Claimed Traffic
| Page Views Per Month | 234,979 |
|---|---|
| Uniques Per Month | 169,315 |
Reported Revenue
Claimed Financials
| Gross Revenue (avg per month) | $402 |
|---|---|
| Net Profit (avg per month) | $402 |
Monetization Methods
| Advertising Sales | Yes |
|---|---|
| Product or Service Sales | No |
| Affiliate Income | No |
Site Uniqueness
- Content is claimed to be unique
- Design is claimed to be unique
Seller
Attachments
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Indexed Pages - Google Webmaster Tools
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$600 Adsense Income April
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Adsense Income May
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Adsense Income June
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Admin Panel
jpg file
Tags
Contextual Help
- The winner of this listing will be required to pay a 5% success fee to Flippa.
More Information ^ - Ownership transfer is safest when using Escrow.com (more information)
Seller also accepts payment using: PayPal ^
Since I can no longer edit the details as I received a bid and it blocked it....
Notable Features:
High ranking for various keywords and phrases
Debate module
Forum module
Approx 1,000 registered members
1+ Years old
Page Rank 5
Mobile version which is automatically enabled when users arrive with phone
Thousands of inbound links
Other info:
Indexed Page Count: Google 2,083,038 (see screen)
The community is very busy with many active members.
80,000+ questions
79,000+ answers
3,000-9,000 unique visitors per day
Users are encouraged to be active via voting system
Regarding Price:
For those of you that consider a website only worth the price of the income times x amount of months, as I know some of the Flippa community does, consider this:
1. Try comparing with domains, not websites, since this website could be essentially passive income. Domains sell for 8x to 10x yearly multiples. Domains with high quality traffic over a long period of time often sell for much more.
2. If you are comparing with websites, you should try to find prices for a website that:
- Is fully established and has had significant traffic for over 1 year.
- Has extremely attractive visitor demographics (~50-70k rank in Alexa)
- Has a highly active userbase built up over years (1,000+ users)
- Includes a huge amount of high quality, original content
- Thousands of linkbacks from thousands of different websites
- Has a good presence in search engines (Over 2,000,000 indexed pages, see screenshot)
When you say the site has a custom design, are you talking about the appearance or the script or both?
Why do you have the video/audio answers option disabled?
Can you explain the decline in revenue?
1) Both, I've modified this script from the original form very heavily and you'll not find another with the added features and enhancements.
2) Video/Audio requires Red5 to run which is ran using Java. This eats a lot of resources and it wasn't used enough to justify the extra resource usage.
3) The visitor amount decreases in the summer times which also make the revenue decrease. I believe this will rebound after summer when kinds and all return to school/work.
The site is built using PHP. It uses Smarty templating engine so you can easily modify the look and feel. It also supports logins from Facebook, openid and Ning.
pm reserve please
Hi -- interesting site! A few questions:
1) Can you post your getclicky analytics?
2) Can you post any info on traffic prior to a few months?
3) Are your content providers paid? 70k+ answers and 1k users means that some of your users are answering a ton of questions.
4) How is traffic to your site generated. SEO?
And one comment: you're playing with fire using textlinkads. Google can put the smack-down on your domain.
Could you put Google analytics up and share access to it? It would give bidders additional confidence (meaning potential for higher bids).
I am going to bid on this site, but with better analytics and revenue proof I can bid higher than without it, if you can do more to substantiate the claims made please PM me.
There are links coming from your own network of sites. Can you please share how many of those sites are owned by you and what will happen to those links?
I do not have Google Analytics but I do have Getclicky. Please PM me for a public link to the QuestionBin dashboard in order to see statistics -- serious bidders only please. Traffic is mainly organic and comes from Search Engines. Yes, as with any question/answer site there are paid and non-paid staff members. It is up to you to continue paying them - at this point the traffic is already there and may not longer be applicable. A payment system is built into QuestionBin for staff members that automatically calculates payments. Many questions and answers are from guests.
I will sustain the links to QuestionBin from my other network sites for 6 months. All sites in the network listing at the bottom are mine except for trilldesigns.
sweet site
Hi Jordan,
Could you please pm me all out bound costs per month required to keep the site at it's current level.
PM sent.
Also, anyone that purchases using Buy It Now I'll also include the sister site http://www.unixbin.com which is a replica of QuestionBin.com but specifically for Unix and Linux questions (similar to serverfault).
How do you fight spammers on this site? Blog, forum, questions/answers kind of sections are all attacked by spammers usually. Your site seems to be clean from spam.
I've created a spam detection algorithm which estimates the chance a comment/question/forum/etc is spam. Over a certain percentage and I get an email. I also review every guest answer. There are other algorithms and third-party spam detection techniques in place.
Is this an a all in-house script or is there support from QA script developer?
Also according to your Adsense screenshots, page impressions have dropped by more than half from April to June. Why is traffic dying? This is also reflected on Alexa.
thanks
It was a paid for script but has been heavily modified so there is no support.
Many of the visitors are younger visitors and surf while at school. School is out so traffic dropped. From my experience, a drop in traffic during the summer time is typical (less people online, more people outside, etc). Also, Google recently changed their indexing system (caffeine). I watched all of my pages drop from Google's index in May and slowly reappear. I believe this has impacted traffic as well.
So pretty much the new owner will have to be proficient with PHP beyond admin GUI's?
If you want to enhance it or make any changes to the core, yes. Otherwise, it operates as is just fine. The template system is done with Smarty so you do not need to be proficient in PHP to change the look and feel.
Interesting opportunity. Please PM reserve.
How much does it cost per month to run this site?
The VPS server is the only constant monthly cost. Without any staff or advertisement it will sustain its current statistics.
You were paying to have people answer and post questions? How much were you paying them and would they continue to do it at the same rates?
Indeed, as I answered above:
"Yes, as with any question/answer site there are paid and non-paid staff members. It is up to you to continue paying them - at this point the traffic is already there and may no longer be applicable. A payment system is built into QuestionBin for staff members that automatically calculates payments. Many questions and answers are from guests."
You'll have to establish relationships, rates and expenses with your own staff if you desire to grow the site at a faster rate as is their intention. I cannot answer if they will continue with a new owner but my guess is yes. Paying staff is an unneeded expense and only for growing the site at a faster rate thus it is not calculated as an expense and entirely up to the new owner. This is identical to hiring forum posters on a forum.
Why your twitter account has only 19 followers? I think this kind of website must spread with social viral to really take off! I like it, I am in...
I've never been successful with Twitter, but I agree. You could extend the Twitter functionality of the site to accept questions from Twitter as well.
can you explain that?
http://www.unixbin.com/
A Unix/Linux Question and Answer site. As I stated in previous comments:
"anyone that purchases using Buy It Now I'll also include the sister site http://www.unixbin.com which is a replica of QuestionBin.com but specifically for Unix and Linux questions (similar to serverfault)."
Thanks
Reserve is now set at 15k.
I agree with the Twitter account this could really help the. Anyways, how many hours per day do you spend to run this website?
An average of about 1 hour per day. I try to pop-in and check for spam (also receive spam alerts via email) and answer questions on occasion. The mobile version of the site allows me to ask/answer from my phone so I do that quite often.
Time reduced.
BIN reduced for a quick sale for the last day of the auction. This BIN price does not include unixbin.com
What is the script the site uses? How long is the learning curve?
Script is from a development company but it has been heavily modified from the original form. Learning curve is probably 2-3 weeks. The admin panel is very intuitive and easy to learn. I've attached a screenshot of the administration panel.
I mean to ask is .. whether the script is specifically made for this site, or is it some regular script which was modified for this site. I am asking because regular scripts comes with good amount of documentation.
It was a regular script at one point.
interesting site. i see there are adsense ads on pages with adult content. since this can easily get a site banned from google, is there a way to automatically disable adsense on pages with profanity or adult content?
You can easily exclude your adsense code from the adult question categories from inside smarty. However, if you look at other question/answer sites with adult content you'll still notice Google Adsense and they have been running for years. QB has been running for over a year without any problem from Adsense. The only objection I can find in the TOS: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=105957 is
Sexual tips or advice
You could also entirely remove the adult section to rectify the situation.