SitePoint

Sold!

Winning Bid: $2,500.00

Congratulations to the winning bidder, who has chosen to remain nameless!

Bid History

3 Exceptional Arcade Sites For Sale

hand crafted - unique branding - beautiful designs

• URL: http://www.craverz.com/
• Established: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:00:00 GMT
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 5
• Listed: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:39:45 GMT

Description:

I am proud to announce the sale of a high quality portfolio of 3 Arcade Game Sites: FingerMonkey.net - LittleLoki.net - Craverz.com

Before getting into details on each particular site in this super trio, I want to provide some context to the auction so that you get a better idea of what you're bidding on.

• BACKGROUND

This is not an ordinary arcade site auction. An ordinary arcade site auction tries to sell a near-default installation of a popular arcade script, throws in an add-on games pack and will have been given 1 to 2 months of SEO and advertising treatment.

In this auction, each site is a labor of love. Each site has a unique identity built around three main principals:

Original Design: these sites stand out in the crowd because they were built on individual design concepts. There are simply no other sites like them.

Strong Branding: branding for each of these sites is a combination of a unique name, carfeully associated graphics and a consistent color scheme. The coordination and harmony of these elements is crucial if visitors are going to remember your site's name and be able to recognise it visually.

Quality Content: The game content in each site was hand picked and each game was tested prior to uploading. The strategy for game selection is based on several questions:

1) Would I actually want to play this game myself?
2) Does this game resonate within current popular culture?
3) How popular is the game right now in the arcade industry?

• WHY SELL?

FingerMonkey.net was my first arcade. Established in July 2007. Prior to this I had never been a webmaster. I started FM as an experiment. I wanted to get first hand knowledge of what it takes to penetrate and succeed in a niche market.

As the site began to grow, I developed an interest in arcade scripts.  I found that the majority of scripts were sub-standard. That the market was flooded with poorly crafted sites. I then purchased one of the 'premium' scripts on the market to see whether a more expensive backend would yield better results. So I launched LittleLoki.net.

I continued to experiment with both sites in parallel, submitting them to over 100 directory sites. There were a lot of questions driving this effort: for example, how well would the same game do on two different sites? How did arcade audience demographics work? What were some of the main visitor behavioural patterns and what did they mean?

In many ways, owning and developing arcade sites has been the subject of a personal study on niche markets. The culmination of this experience came with my most recent site Craverz.com. This is a site that took all the data compiled from the previous two sites, along with observations on the wider arcade market and applied this in practical terms to the building of a new arcade. Everything about Craverz.com is hand crafted. Nothing was left to chance. It is of little surprise then that Craverz is closest to my heart and without doubt the most successful of the trio. 

I'm selling these sites because as far as I'm concerned there's nothing more I can learn from them. I'm not interested in exploiting the financial side of being a webmaster. I plan on using my acquired knowledge in a consultant capacity to faciliate the planning and implementation stages of websites.

So the next logical step for these three arcade sites is for an entrepreneur, a media mogul or business minded person to step in with some shrewd marketing ideas and reap the rewards of 3 special sites built on very solid foundations.

• PORTFOLIO OVERVIEW

FingerMonkey.net: FingerMonkey is a slick silver and black arcade with characteristic neon green highlights. It's centered around a crazed monkey motif who beckons you in to unleash the gamer in you! The site is powered by Arcadem Pro, houses nearly 200 games and has over 200 subscribed users.

Some of the site's special features include a game review section that covers and cross references some of the top games on the site and a popular arcade blog (included in sale - see details below in 'extras' section). The latest post titles of the blog are displayed on the arcade front page.

For visitor stats and screenshots, please see attached images to the right hand side of this auction page.

LittleLoki.net: LittleLoki was launched in October 2007. It's is a beautifully crafted arcade with red and yellow tones, built around 'Loki' - the mythical god of the underworld. The site's tagline is "devilishly fun flash games" and that's the sort of content you'll find on this site. The most popular games tend to be the blood and gore Zombie games which are most inline with the decor and site theme. This arcade gets great user interaction with frequent comments and feedback.

The arcade is powered by the premium script ProArcadeScript which offers a very user friendly backend and an easily modifiable template system.

For visitor stats and screenshots, please see attached images to the right hand side of this auction page.

Craverz.com: Craverz is what I call 'spaceage grunge'. The site was launched in April this year. The design, logo and implementation were all built from the bottom up by me. You can read about the whole development process on the FingerMonkey Arcade Blog here. The overall design result is outstanding and has led to the site being features in several design galleries.

Besides a unique design and layout, what sets Craverz a part from other arcades, is the fact that it's powered by WordPress. This offers severeal immediate benefits. First of all it can make use of huge amount of free plugings for WordPress, the most important one being the 'allinone SEO plugin'. It scores highly on search engines (its common knowledge that Google loves WordPress). It also benefits from constant WordPress improvement thanks to the huge WP developer community.

Games are entered as posts. Each game has a description that acts as a blog post. You add tags to the post and ascribe a category. Each post is set up to be automatically published on Technorati and also on the Craverz Twitter account (this is also included as part of the sale, see extras below). So in terms of SEO this site is really hawt!

There are some particulary cool features added to Craverz including the neat Meebo chat room integration that allows users to interact. There's also a user rating function that serves to differentiate the best games on the site and a user game submission form. Finally there's a Craverz blog integrated into the site.

For visitor stats and screenshots, please see attached images to the right hand side of this auction page.

• EXTRAS

Included in this sale are some nifty extras, not to be frowned upon.

First off there's the great FingerMonkey Arcade Blog, a PR4 blog powered by WordPress with some superb content including the highly popular how to create a WordPress arcade series of posts and various other key resources. This blog is well worth keeping, at the very least it provides some free traffic to the arcades, but used wisely it can be a great marketing tool.

Secondly there's the Craverz Twitter account. Another valuable publicity and marketing tool. New game entries on Craverz are automatically sent to the Twitter account, so you don't have to do anything with it at all if you don't want to.

Thirdly there's an installation of the hugely popular Mint analytics tool, running on Craverz. You'll be able to claim this copy and get great real time inside information on site trends.

Fourthly, you'll also get the craverz.mobi and cravorz.com domain names as well as the main craverz.com TLD. This is a great opportunity to branch out into the mobile industry later on down the line.

• NOTE ON REVENUE

As mentioned in the 'Why Sell' section, the object of running these sites has never been profit driven and that's reflected in several ways. On the one hand I haven't purchased any advertising space for any of the sites, so all traffic is completely organic. On the other hand I haven't experimented with ad services either. All sites run google ads but I've never run any campaigns or tried pushing the site for agressive monetization. Therefore, whoever steps in to buy these sites will need to have an idea about how best to monetize them. Right now each site makes around 2-3 dollars. With a little bit of work I'm sure you could double that in next to no time. After that, like everything, it all depends on how far you're willing to go.

• WHAT'S ON SALE AT A GLANCE

+ 3 unique arcade sites with all their content.

+ 100s of handpicked games and hand crafted thumbnails for each site.

+ 5 domain names (craverz.com, cravorz.com, craverz.mobi, fingermonkey.net, littleloki.net) all domains on godaddy.

+ 1 arcade weblog (fingermonkey arcade blog) powered by WordPress

• FINAL THOUGHTS

This is a great opportunity for someone keen to step into the arcade games industry and get a huge head start. It could also be of interest to current webmasters looking to strengthen and expand their portfolio.

Whatever your circumstances remember that what you are buying here are 3 great brands, 3 unique arcades and 3 beautiful designs. Happy bidding!

Revenue Details:

See note on revenue above.

View Site Statistics

Attachments

• Thumbnail:

  FingerMonkey.net Screenshot

• Thumbnail:

  FingerMonkey.net Admin Panel

• Thumbnail:

  FingerMonkey.net Google Analytics Report

• Thumbnail:

  LittleLoki.net Screenshot

• Thumbnail:

  LittleLoki.net Admin Panel

• Thumbnail:

  LittleLoki.net Google Analytics Report

• Thumbnail:

  Craverz.com Screenshot

• Thumbnail:

  Craverz.com Admin Panel

• Thumbnail:

  Craverz.com Google Analytics Report