I talked to X and asked him "How much you want for it?" He turns, looks at me and said "about three fitty".

Well considering that X was going to close the site, and ended up giving it to Pseudo and Pugz instead, I don't think nostalgia is THAT strong a motivation.

Every time I talked to X, he told me he isn't doing this for profit. That was his mistake. You don't put your all into changing something if you have no gain out of it. Nostalgia? X hasn't battled, made a crew or voted since 2007, how nostalgic is he really going to be?

I've always liked the idea of someone buying it. X did solid on his return, but now it's very evident that "the new site" is LB v5 version 3, it's not coming and it's not actively being worked on.

RULE was my pick at the time. Guy cares about LB, but is adult enough to treat it like an actual investment for himself and his family. Me and RULE talked a lot about advertising and he had a lot of avenues he wanted to approach about it. The fact LB hasn't been advertised since 2006 is insanity.

A site needs about 400 unique views a day to be able to add adverts to it (and remember, X is deliberately handing away 1/4 if his potential profits by advertising BeatDisk, a website he started and stopped running about 7 years ago. LB gets more than enough unique views, the problem would simply be that the hosting is expensive (although a good chunk of it could have been paid off when everyone was making donations, unfortunately it only paid for Pugz' pretend rap battle host career).

You guys should find out the Financials of this place before you start wanting to buy it. In my mind, X is probably doing us a favor by keeping this place open. You will also have to think about a tech team. Straight out I am willing to work as a Dev for free/equity in the site depending on how much you want to do, but you will probably need more people. Idk if anyone else here has Dev experience, maybe mindless???

You don't need any experience to be a dev. Apparently all you have to do is be Russian, find a guy named Pugz, take his money and never do anything ever again.

Letsbeef is worth nowhere near 5 figures. I could understand the code being worth a couple grand and maybe the site holding sentimental value driving the price up. But I'm almost positive it's coded shitty and looking online for LB's alexa rankings and other metrics, LB falls further down the rankings weekly. This site couldn't even generate you $200/month in ad revenue. If they say otherwise they're lying to you

^This.

It's nowhere near worth 5 figures considering it's massive downwards trend. The code is fairly simple to replicate. I am pretty sure that in about 1 week I could recreate the entire site in Java or C#, and I'm not even well trained at this stuff right now.

So basically, you're buying the brand and SEO. The site still hits really high on searches, and the brand makes all of us keep logging on. With the brand terribly fleeting, alone with the market in which the site originally sits, it's likely not anywhere near 7500.

With some work on branding, advertising and marketing, including some more updates and innovation, sure, we could see something happening that turns it into a more profitable site. But no one's working on that stuff.

Just if we think in simple terms, I absolutely hate it as I never really got into the iPhone craze, but in major websites you have your menu now signalled by the three horizontal lines. This is clear everywhere. LB has the globe for some reason. It's just about adopting the website to modern times, and then crafting out a piece of innovation which frankly is in an unexplored market.

No one is doing rap battle stuff anymore, even though the actual rap battle market is booming.

LB needs to be more shiny and glossy in it's appearance. That's what people want in 2017. Websites are all typically laid out the same, and that's because the market has pushed that direction. Because of the warping of people's minds through bytesized information like Twitter and Reddit, no one wants complexity. No one wants to "figure it out". LB needs to be insanely accessible and open for rapid use of the site. Currently, it's not. We'd still need to explain to people what to use.

I'd love to get full control of LB cause I honestly think I'd be able to do a lot with it based off the structure and combining ideas of what makes LB currently / formerly great and what people want in 2017 for a website. But alas, I'm broke as fk :D

Most to all of the backend work could probably be kept. IDK about how this site is hosted but I'm just going to guess that the admins have done all of the hard work in figuring out scalability and all of that jazz. If traffic were to increase there may be some other stuff that would need added in terms of DB sharding, microservices, or just general cleanup, but by in large that should be good. That right there is worth money. Not a ton, but there are a lot of features on here that work and were probably built from the ground up.

The actual site is the part that needs work. Mobile is a huge part of the game right now and having a real mobile site or even an app should be the first priority. The site right now is alright but could be better. Mobile would require either building out an entire app in Java, or by using an Angular/React native bundler. In my mind, using a React Native/Nativescript bundler would make more sense, as you could also build out a desktop and a mobile responsive site with the same framework. IDK, it's a lot of work. Just to rebuild the site, clean up bugs, and add either a PWA site or a straight up app would take a while to rewrite everything, probably several months for 2-3 guys part time. It's doable, but would be slow.

As stated before, I'm down to help out, but don't really have the time or the experience (especially on the mobile side) to lead, you'd probably want someone that's already working on it.

X is probably doing you guys a favor by not allowing you to buy this place, real talk.

>building the site in Java or C#

Okay, but those aren't really web browser languages. I mean, yeah, you CAN run Java in the browser but why would you?

Honestly, the best thing would be for someone to come in as an investor I think. Somebody that can put in the money and time to find additional programmers and pay for them to help X out with what is essentially a hobby.

I don't know precisely how the ownership of this site breaks down, but I don't really think that someone paying outright for the site makes a lot of sense.

The most sensible way in my mind is for a group of individuals to submit a proposal to X to work on the site. Most likely this will be a group of programmers. This proposal will probably be for a certain percentage of equity in the site, which is received upon completion. X doesn't really lose anything as he's already (presumably) losing money on the site and may close it down anyway, and the team doesn't have to pay up front for a losing product. At that point, any sort of larger ownership deal can be arranged between the two parties.

This protects the buyer from paying for a site that may well go under, and provides X with an easy potential escape route out of a losing situation.