My company has built and run a number of fairly successful web sites in various areas for many years but recently we have moved into a business area that is not internet related. Also, I had a heart attack a few months back and need to take things a bit easier now, so we have decided to try to sell our flagship social networking community, which currently takes up most of my time.

It's in a real niche area too - transgender social networking - and it's been going since 1999. I should stress that this is not a porn site in any way.

There are currently around 21500 members, SelfSEO's link popularity checker reports more than 94,000 links to the site from around the web with Yahoo alone reporting 76,000+.

The name of the site is a registered trademark in the main countries we operate in, including the US, UK and Australia.

The site itself boasts forums with around 43500 posts, 431 photo galleries and all the usual features like chat rooms, blogs, personal ads, regular newsletters, shopping and much more. The site is mainly run on a day to day basis by it's members who are unpaid volunteers. The only paid member of staff is me and otherwise there are very few overheads besides my small salary.

On average over six million hits are recorded each month, equating to well over two million pages views (2,085,107 in December 2007).

We think that all represents a great deal of potential for a new owner.

As professionals in this area I’d like to know what you think it’s worth? How much should we be looking for when we sell the whole community? I’m just looking for ball park figures so that when we go on the market, I won’t be asking for too much or indeed, too little.

I haven’t mentioned the name of the site or its URL because I don’t want the members to discover that we are thinking of selling up, but please drop me a line if you need more info.

You’re the experts, please tell me what you think.

Many thanks,

Tony

If the site has been around since 1999 and you only have 20,000 members then something is wrong. I doubt the site has been around since 1999. Social networking sites really didn't exist back then. Only dating sites and only a few were niche dating sites. Niche dating didn't really evolve until 2001 so, i'm a little reluctant in believing this.

I promise you that I'm telling the truth and I can prove it too. Our domain was registered in December 1999 and the site started initially as a forum using YABB, which you may know is open source forum software.

However, it allowed people to register and become members and as time went on chat rooms and picture galleries were added. Then in 2002, when the software was creaking under the strain, we moved to a new dedicated server and employed a company in Canada who specialize in creating community software.

Since then we've added blogs, a monthly newsletter, personal ads, polls, surveys, clubs, games, shopping, e-cards, a personal site builder, a search engine dedicated to our niche ans heaps of other features to keep our members coming back again and again. Our full members also get an email account of their own, a bit like Hotmail.

Next month we're installing video for the first time so we'll have much the same capability as YouTube and members will also be able to put video in their profiles.

One reason why our membership levels are fairly low is because we are constantly culling the membership. The criteria we use is, if a member has not logged in for six months and if his/her email address is not longer valid and if they are not a paying member, then their account is deleted.

Our small band of advertisers thank us for doing this because it means we are being much more honest about our membership than some other sites, which hang on to dormant account for years just to make it look as though they have more members than they really do.

Hope that addresses your concerns.

Tony