When you try to determine the value of a forum what do you look at. And lets use objective fields rather than what you "think" your forum is worth.

Nothing to do with actual income - everything to do with potential income. No one is going to buy or invest in a business unless they feel confident that they can earn a return on their investment.

Webmaster Bob has a forum that delivers 1,000,000 banner impressions monthly, but he is only able to sell 200,000 banner impressions a month at $5 CPM. Webmaster Bob only makes $1,000 a month, and thinks it's great when Marketer Jane buys his forum for $36,000 - three full years worth of his revenue.

Marketer Jane hires a two person sales team with good connections and selling skills, and is able to sell 1,000,000 banner impressions monthly at $10 CPM. Marketer Jane makes back her full investment in less than four months.

You bring up an excellent point of having a marketing department. I've been thinking about this alot myself lately.

That is something that I look at when I am looking at forums for sale. I look at how they are currently using the site to generate income and then look at if I can improve it.

Glad somebody said it here. The 12-18 months revenue idea is good for a forum buyer to use if it works for them, but if they are smart, they will have evaluated what they think they can make with the forum with a propery advertising campaign.

Notice that the moral of the story is that women are always smarter in business than men

I'd buy forums all day long at 12-18 months revenue if I was in the forum owning business. Realize my investment in less than 24 months if the results stay static? Sign me up!

In my opinion, proper valuation of a forum is quite an intricate task. However, the one metric I put a lot of weight into that I see few others mention is active members. How many of your members login during X duration. That tells me a LOT about your forum's value.

Dani - I love me a smart woman!

David - I think your very right about that also, the more active members you have the better to keep things flowing.

I always look at the Activity, that includes posts per day, threads, page views, unique vistors and registrations per day. That all comes second though to the actual content.

When i get forums, i want something thats fresh, had a huge untapped niche market, or has the ability to tap into a large share of the market for its particular topic.

You also should check out the loyalty of the site to its current owner and how the community would handle a change of ownership.