Hansup Yoon (pictured right), 15, has sold ZuneBoards, an Internet forum devoted to Microsoft’s Zune media player, for $62,000.

The teen, who recently moved from Irvine to Fullerton, created the site months before Microsoft introduced its answer to Apple’s iPod in 2oo6.

“It was the most perfect time to start a Web site about Zune and I was one of the first few to create a Zune-related site,” Yoon  told me in an exchange of e-mails.

Yoon  built the site himself using (free) MyBBoard software, later shifting to vBulletin and Joomla! (See a screen grab of ZuneBoards below.) In less than two years it grew to 60,000 members and more than 270,000 posts, all about Zune. It has been making about $1,000 a month from  Google Adsense and TribalFusion, both with tools that place ads that are relevant to a Web site’s visitors.

When he decided to sell, he posted it on SitePoint and other Web site sales sites for a minimum of $30,000 or “Buy It Now” for $60,000. Two bidders chose the latter option and crowdgather, a Woodland Hills company that has bought more than 70 message boards and forums as a foundation for Internet advertising, upped its bid to $62,000.

“Bidding was getting close to the Buy It Now price and I didn’t want to lose (ZuneBoards) over a few thousand dollars,” explained crowdgather founder Sanjay Sabnani.

Sabnani wasn’t surprised to learn that his acquisition was created and owned by a teen-ager.

“I’m getting more and more used to that,” he said. “My first acquisition was a graphic site from someone in Italy. I was blown away when I found out he was 16.”

Because Yoon is a minor, crowdgather negotiated with his parents, and the deal closed in a day. They used escrow.com, an Irvine site that acts as a shield against fraud between buyers and sellers of businesses, Web sites etc., Sabrani said.

Yoon’s ability to build a profitable Web site would be the envy of older and wiser entrepreneurs.

“At first I tried to teach myself with books I would buy from bookstores…However, ultimately, I was mostly self-taught from other Web development communities like Forums.DigitalPoint.com, SitePoint.com and NamePros.com,” Yoon said. “The Internet is an amazing place. You can practically learn anything you want if you’re willing to make a time commitment.

“It is so easy to make money on the Internet. Web development. Made-for-Adsense sites. Affiliate marketing. Paid to post. And the list goes on,” Yoon said. “I guess that’s one reason why I am so thankful to God. Not everyone has the mentality and understanding of how things work online as I do.”

After he designed ZuneBoards, he marketed it by exchanging posts with other small forums. In a few months he had several volunteer administrators and moderators who made sure the forums were organized and all posts obeyed the site’s rules. ZuneBoards now has more than 70 people working on it.

“The great thing was I had so much freedom,” Yoon said. “I only spent 30 minutes online a day on ZuneBoards. I could go on vacation any time I wanted.”

Yoon decided to sell ZuneBoards to spend more time on his school studies. He will be a sophomore at Troy High School this fall and plans to try out for the football team. Also, with the slow economy, he wanted to give some financial support to his family.

“Thirdly, I felt that I wasn’t doing my best to really make ZuneBoards grow to its full capabilities,” he added. “I felt a new ownership would really bring in fresh leaders that were really motivated and focused on the growth of ZuneBoards.”

He said he will continue as a site administrator but not have ownership responsibility.

Sabnani said young entrepreneurs who are going to school or working full time and running forums on the side have a tough time. “They don’t get the respect of advertisers. The bigger you are, the higher the advertisers will pay for the same advertising inventory.”

Yoon, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, describes himself as a normal American teen-ager.

“I love sports. I love to hang out. I love to game. I’ve played lacrosse and baseball in the past. This will be my fourth year playing football as a running back,” he said. “To be honest, only a few of my close friends even know I do this.”

He has not yet planned out a future of entrepreneurial ventures.

“It’s kinda hard to see into my future right now, but I can definitely imagine myself working for my church, starting a nonprofit organization or even being a youth pastor,” he said. “I can’t imagine myself grown up sitting behind a computer all day making money while there are hundreds of millions of people who are starving and never felt God’ s love.”

“He’s a great kid and a valuable member of our church,” said Matthew Lee of Sarang Community Church in Anaheim. Han is doing some Web site work for our high school ministry.”

FBLA - As some of you may have known, I entered two competitions this year for FBLA: Internet Application Programming and Web Site Development. I’m happy to announce that I placed 5th place in the state of California for Internet Application Programming, and 2nd place for Web Site Development (which was enough for me to go to nationals). Unfortunately, I lost in the preliminaries in nationals. I definitely plan to go for round 2 next year.

rsvp2.0 is a fully functional mock-up startup website, created to be entered into a FBLA event–Internet Application Programming. rsvp 2.0 takes internet event management to a whole higher level. Why limit the program to a single, specific event, if you could open it up to a whole variety of people? That is why rsvp 2.0 is designed to be ready for a full-scale web startup. Any user can sign up and create as many events as they would like, and have the power to manage all of them with one simple account management system at rsvp 2.0.

rsvp2.0 was designed (photoshop) and coded (php/mysql) by me, and was selected as one of the Top 3 going into State Conference. I will keep you updated on the results, but hopefully I may be able to advance to Nationals Competition.

During January and February, I was busy working on two big projects for FBLA, aka Future Business Leaders of America. I entered two events: Web Site Development and Internet Application Programming, which literally sucked hours upon hours of my time. Good news though– I have made States for one of the events. I’m not sure about the other one yet (results are not out yet), but I am CONFIDENT that I have made States for that event too.

Lastly, I have a major project in the workings. Still in the very, very very early stages, but I am VERY excited! Hopefully, I will have proper funding to really get it off its feet. More details to come! (:

But it’s all good, cause I got my friend, eBay:

Also, a lot of my time has been taken away by my (two) FBLA projects. So right now, I have about 4 projects I’m working on.

However, I can tell you a few things: be very excited. I’ve been working with my friend recently, and I can tell you that awesome projects are on their way. I can’t give away too much information right now, but personally I have 2 projects that I’m very excited about.

Let’s see if I can pull this one off by this Summer ‘09.

In just a few months after the sale of ZuneBoards, I see that traffic has picked up significantly already on ZuneBoards. Shows really how fast the site can grow every year. As the Zune grows, the site grows along with it.

ZuneBoards was a experimental project of mine in the Summer of 2006, where rumors were flying around about a supposed “iPod Killer” from Microsoft. Immediately I picked up the domain, and I gotta tell you I don’t regret that decision at all.

Here are some stuff I copied directly from the sale page of ZuneBoards:

Staff
We have great, dedicated dedicated staff– all voluntary workers. We have a full lineup of staff, from editors, to multiple global moderators, multiple section moderators, Support Team, Hacks&Mods Crew, Graphics Crew, Programmers, and even a welcoming team. Without the staff, it’d be virtually impossible to manage all the content on ZuneBoards.

News and Articles
There are more than 400 articles written by me, and our writers. All articles are organized into smaller sections, for example, “Zune Accessory Reviews” or “Interviews.” Check it out for yourself on ZuneBoards.com.

Forums
The ZuneBoards forum should be given credit for the site’s success. The forums generate the most pageviews, and is loved by Google (indexed and ranked very well). As of today there are ~55,000 members with 250,000 posts.
Underneath ZuneBoards’ forums are 20, yes twenty, forums for staff and our team members. (Screenshot 1 2 3)

Zune Games
Very recently, Microsoft announced XNA support for the Zune. A few months later, they released the Community Technical Preview for XNA 3.0 and games for the Zune were (and are) being made left and right. ZuneBoards released the first “How to Install Zune Games” article and was featured in mega-blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo. Shortly after, ZuneBoards now have almost monopolized Zune Games. ZuneBoards is THE place to find games. We have the largest database of Zune games, submitted by developers themself. Take a look here.  The Zune games section was the fastest growing forum we have ever seen! To put things short, ZuneBoards is leading the world in Zune Games.

We also have a ZuneBoards Programming team, who released multiple games and application, including the worlds first Zune clock.

Our Reputation
Since July ‘06, we’ve built up quite a reputation around the Zune community. We’ve been on huge websites like Engadget, Lifehacker, HackaDay, and even the frontpage of Digg. We are known for the first Zune hack, and many other multiple hacks, which brought us literally thousands of members and hits.

A list of hacks we’ve released in the past:

Zune Hacked for USB Use
Zune Guest Hack
Zune Guest Hack on Digg
Zune Multi-Extension Hack
Zune Hacked for Korean, Chinese, and Japanese Character Support
Maximizing Your Zune Software
Superior Zune Installation Program
A Valentines Gift to Zuners
Zune Marketplace Alternator
Z(une) M(edia) P(layer)
Zune Hacked for Korean, Chinese, and Japanese Character Support on HackaDay
Zune 2.2 to 1.4 Downgrade

Our talented programmers also released a few nifty programs and games:

zNav
zMeta
zStats
Official ZuneBoards Clock for the Zune
ZIM (Zune Instant Messenger)
Zune Textbook Reader
Metronome for the Zune
Zune Calculator
Sleep Timer for the Zune
Solitaire for the Zune
GoldChase
SIRTET (Tetris) for the Zune
Running Man Game for the Zune
Squadron Z

There are much much much more! Check it out for yourself here.

Zunecentive
For quite a while we ran a program called “Zunecentive”. It gave incentives to those who remained active and posted, with prizes as Zune accessories from our sponsors. In some occassions, some managed to even win Zune’s. I have a few accessories remaining, but I have temporarily stopped the program as I had no time to ship them out. More information on that here.

ZuneTV, now known as VidsforZune
Just recently we have launched a major project called “ZuneTV.” ZuneTV was featured on Mashable, The #1 Social Networking and Social Media News Blog, and a lot of other blogs and news sites. However, we ran into some legal concerns and decided to switch the domain name from ZuneTV.net to VidsforZune.com. Microsoft, however, is now perfectly fine with VidsforZune.com.

Podcast

Currently we have a “brother” site, whom we sponsor in their weekly Zune podcast. For more info on the podcast, check it out here.

Potential Growth
Potential, in my opinion, is one of the most important factor in selling a website. Well my friend, this website is chock full of potential. Here is a quote that pretty much explains the future of Zune:

Robbie Bach also stated that although the millions invested are many, the profit will come out only after five years (which means we’ll be seeing Zune even in 2011…). For the immediate period, the Redmond giant only expects losses.
According to the high ranked official, such initiative is to cost “hundreds of millions of dollars in investment over time,” making it a long term bet. He compared Zune’s case to the Xbox platform, which has also produced losses estimated at $1-1.2 billion to Microsoft, since its initial launch in 2001.
“It is something that is going to take time. This is not a six month initiative,” he added. “This is something that is going to be a three-, four-, five-year investment.”

That’s right. The Zune is here to stay, and is going nowhere but up. With a huge corporation like Microsoft, they will keep throwing more and more money into the Zune, until it finally dethrones the iPod. Take the Xbox 360 as an example. When the Xbox entered the console gaming market, it was criticized heavily with comments like, “They’ll never beat Sony.” Look at the Xbox now!

The same team that’s made Xbox the best selling console is now working on making the best selling music player–the Zune… and guess what? You have the opportunity to own one of the world’s largest Zune site. That really opens up a huge potential for ZuneBoards.com. Imagine how HUGE Zune will be in 5 years. Imagine how it’ll feel to own one of the largest Zune forum at that time.

YOU could be the owner of the “iLounge” of Zune. Take the traffic and revenue I have posted, and double, triple, or even quadriple that, and you’ll be looking at the stats in 3, 4, 5 years. Think of this as a long term investment. Trust me, if I could’ve, I would’ve held on to this baby for a long time.

This website is so content rich, it would take me hours upon hours to write about every single detail. The best way to find out, is to go to ZuneBoards.com for yourself and check it out.

For more information, feel free to check out this news article on the OC Register, or leave a comment.

1. Forum Software - Choosing the right forum software can be a great time and money saver in the long run. I can testify from personal experience. It’s really a pain in the ass for you AND the members to go through a forum software switch. It screws up a lot of the permissions and makes your members reset their password (depending on the forum softwares). Right from the beginning, choose a software to stick with. I highly recommend vBulletin.
2. Post Exchanges - In my opinion, this is the easiest way to make your forum seem more active. Everyday, hundreds of webmasters are exchanging posts on forums. What does that all mean? To put it in a simple way, if someone leaves 20 posts on your forum, you leave 20 posts on their forum. When I first began my forum, I did ton of this, and received hundreds of posts. Without post exchanges, I doubt my forum would exist right now.
3. Organization - I hate unorganized forums. Forums that are hard to navigate, messy, and confusing can deter users away. Try not to make too many forum categories and sections. All they do is make the forum homepage longer and make the forum seem emptier. Unpopular/inactive forums should be merged with other larger forums.
4. Number of staff - Remove all unnecessary staff. If there is no moderation and managing needed, why are they even on the staff list? Don’t take me wrong though, staff can’t be really helpful. It’s just embarrassing if a guest lands on your forum and sees more admins and mods than active members.
5. Professionalism - Present your forum in a professional manner, with a good looking design, easy to read, good grammar, and nothing obnoxious. cuz no1 wantz to c u talk lyk dis. itz anoying lol

Well, there you go. I hope you really got something out of it. It’s sad to see forums (some with great potential and a great niche) die out really fast. I may make a part 3, depending on your feedback, so please vote.