Liberal Forum website for sale

[Cirque du So-What]

As I was using the terms 'liberal' and 'forum' in a Google search, I came across this on Sitepoint.com:

Extremely Popular Political Website and Forum (9,148 Members) For Sale
Unbelievable Opportunity for the Right Person
URL: liberalforum.org
Established: 31 Jan 2004
Uniques/Month: 1,700
Page views/month: 11,000
Monthly Revenue: 30.
PageRank: 5
Listed: 11 Apr 2007

Description:
Up for sale in this auction is a truly “established” website community. The website, LiberalForum.org, has been online for years, has great search engine rankings, is extremely well known within the online political sphere, and has a large and active community membership. The website is completely custom designed. At the time of this writing, LiberalForum.org has 9,052 members in its forum community. The community consists of BOTH liberals and conservatives. The popular and active forum has 433,307 discussion posts.

LiberalForum.org is a political website. Specifically, the site is an online meeting place for liberals, progressives, democrats, greens, leftists, and socialists (and anyone else for that matter) interested in discussing liberal ideals, principles, policies, and politics. However, in the interest of democratic spirit --and a robust exchange of ideas LiberalForum.org welcomes conservatives to join. So, the website has BOTH liberals and conservatives who discuss and debate political or other issues. This website presents an excellent opportunity for anyone who is interested in politics, current events or public policy. I originally planned to turn LiberalForum.org into a powerful offline grassroots organization.

The greatest value in this website is its potential. With the upcoming 2008 presidential elections, you can position yourself to be one of the top political websites for political commentary and online discussion about the elections and political issues. LiberalForum.org has a blog which has not been active in some time. However, if you are a good writer or you hire a good writer you have a strong foundation to position this website and the associated blog to the top of the blogosphere.

Domain -- The domain LiberalForum.org was first registered on December 15, 2003, and you won’t have to renew it until December 15, 2007.

SEO and Search Engines -- The site has enjoyed great ranking in the search engines. The site has not been updated in a number of months, but it still ranks well for several popular terms, including:


Ranked #1 for the term “Liberal Forum” in Google
Ranked #1 for the term “Liberal Chat” in Google
Ranked #3 for the term “Liberal Pride” in Google
Ranked #2 for term "Political Forum" on MSN
Ranked #6 for the term “Political Forum” in Yahoo
Ranked #4 for the term “Liberal Talk” in Google



Page Rank 5 -- Both the home page of LiberalForum.org and the forum’s index page are Page Rank 5. The home page was previously a Page Rank 6 for a long time.

Links and Saturation -- At the time of writing this auction, Google shows that 12,587 links pointing to LiberalForum.org, while Yahoo/Alta Vista has 11,307 links pointing to LiberalForum.org.

LiberalForum.org has a search engine saturation of 16,217, with 1,150 pages indexed in Google, 7,234 pages in MSN, and 7,833 in Yahoo and Alta Vista.

In addition, the website has a link-building system in place that has worked well. There is a part of the site that encourages people to display their liberal pride by placing a badge on their website or blog.

When a user displays the badge it results in a link back to LiberalForum.org, resulting in greater visibility, and additional traffic. The website also encourages people to apply for a Liberal Pride Award. You will be able to select the sites that you feel warrants an award or honorable mention.

Website Traffic: LiberalForum.org gets great traffic without promotion or marketing. The site gets traffic just sitting there. You will need to do your own marketing and promotion to sustain and grow the traffic. The traffic has gone down considerably since I have not had time to promote the site for months. Since I moved the site from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server last year, I don't have stats prior to May 2006. The traffic before then was even higher. But as you can clearly see LiberalForum.org has received more than:

15 million hits
4 million page views
860,000 visitors

Community Note: It is very important to me that this board stays in the hands of a liberal or progressive owner. Please contact me prior to bidding, and share with me your idealogical viewpoint. In addition, LiberalForum.org has been lucky to have several very smart and dedicated volunteers who have worked as moderators and assistant admins. I cannot guarantee that any of the volunteers will stay on board after the sale of the site.

Important Terms:

You must be willing to use Escrow.com, and speak with me on the phone prior to the transaction.
The site is being sold “as is,” and there will be absolutely no refunds.
This auction is for the sale of only the domain name, website (pages, images, text) and forum. You are responsible for buying your own invision license to use the discussion board software.
You agree to use Ebay's escrow service for the sale of this website.
Hosting is not included. You will have to move the site and obtain your own hosting.
I shall not be responsible for the accuracy of any of the discussed rankings and any changes in current or future search engine rankings or Page Rank.
I make no representations relating to the site's potential to make money in the future.
I reserve the right to cancel this auction at any time.

Revenue Details:
Please understand that the purpose of the site was not to make money, but to maintain a place for people to talk about political issues. I did not implement a marketing strategy or run the site as one would do for a site focusing on sales and profits. However, that does not mean the site has not generated any revenue. The site has generated advertising money from Google Adsense just sitting there. For the purpose of this auction, you are to assume that the site made no revenue because I want it to be clear that revenue should not be a deciding factor in calculating the site's worth --nor do I want to make representations about future revenue. To date, the site made $1,318.91 from Adsense. Here is the first screenshot showing the top of the page for the aggregate channel data for LiberalForum.org, and the second screenshot shows the bottom of the page which shows the totals. Of course, to comply with Google's terms I have blocked out click through rates. The site has served over six million (6,678,316 ) page impressions via Google Adsense, so with the right web seo and marketing work on the site you could probably drastically improve the revenues.

Traffic Details:
Website Traffic: LiberalForum.org gets great traffic without promotion or marketing. The site gets traffic just sitting there. You will need to do your own marketing and promotion to sustain and grow the traffic. The traffic has gone down considerably since I have not had time to promote the site for months. Since I moved the site from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server last year, I don't have stats prior to May 2006. The traffic before then was even higher. But as you can clearly see LiberalForum.org has received more than:

15 million hits
4 million page views
860,000 visitors

http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/6967

Here's the website for sale:
http://www.liberalforum.org/liberalforum/

The owner has apparently made the site visible to everyone; it required registration & login to view previously.

Does anyone with experience running websites know whether this is a good deal or not?