Large Established Movie Review Site For Sale

Premium Site: Movie-Vault.com​

I am relisting this up for sale again 3 weeks after my original thread. The winning bidders at $50,000 backed out at the last minute.

I have made minor adjustments to the description this time for those that saw the original.

Introduction

I am selling my pride and baby Movie-Vault.com. This sale is for serious buyers only please. Please do not make an offer if you are not willing to pay within the mid 5-digit range.

Movie Vault has plateaued in both traffic and income for quite a while now since I've been so busy with my other 20+ sites.

I spend around an average of an hour a week maintaining the site (adding new featured movies to the front page, updating the NameThatFlick feature, etc.)

I have no doubt income and traffic could be easily increased if more attention and effort was put into the site.

Price

Minimum Bid: $40,000
BIN: $60,000

Please note that I reserve the right to not accept a bid.

What is Movie-Vault.com?

Movie-Vault.com is an established (6 years) movie review website which has been linked from Yahoo.com, Movies.com, Excite.com, among other top sites. We have also been featured in newspapers and even a nation-wide television show. While movie reviews are the site's main focus, news, interviews, and contests are just a small sample of the additional content we showcase.

Features

Below are just some of the main features of the site:

-> Professionally written reviews of over 2150 movies
-> Popular "NameThatFlick" game
-> Completely custom programming on the site, leaving it mostly automated
-> Has been a developed site since 2000 (Archive.org)
-> Volunteer staff of movie reviewers
-> Custom news area
-> Extra featured areas such as articles, top voted movies, and interviews
-> Active Forum

Traffic

Urchin shows a daily average of around 7,000 uniques per day, or 200,000 uniques per month. This has been consistant for probably 2 years now.

However, I believe that the site's statistics are skewed, as a lot of that traffic appears to be search engine spiders such as Google and Yahoo. I believe the actual unique human visitors to be much lower, as AdSense and other ad campaigns don't match up with the server data.

A conservative guess on actual unique human traffic is around 500 uniques per day (15,000 a month).

I can provide private access to the Urchin stats area to serious bidders upon request.

Income

The site is currently making a decent amount of income from a large variety of sources.

The following is private ad income and is basically just from textlinks that take advantage of the great PR the site has to offer.

2004: $3,125
2005: $7,152
2006-to-date: $4,023

Keep in mind that this is just from private, mainly textlink, sales. The site also utilizes FastClick, AdSense, Amazon and Allposters Affiliates, Tribal Fusion, etc.

A tally I came up with from the past 12 months came to:

Private Ads: $4,237
Amazon: $120
Allposters: $100
Casale: $150
TribalFusion: $380
ValueClickMedia: $500
AdSense: $1200
Text-Link-Ads: $200

Total: $6,887

Obviously the site isn't making close to what the asking price for the site is. However, it needs to be noted that I really haven't worked on the site for probably about two years. I only passively do content updates here and there to keep it running.

I still believe the site to be worth much more than a simple 18-month equation due to a number of factors, such as potential and the fact that I commit virtually no time to the site to keep it growing.

Perks

Owning such a presitigious site brings forth many perks. Movie studios like to market their site and often give freebies in exchange for a bit of publicity:

-> Free movie posters and DVD's for contest giveaways
-> Pre-release DVD's for review
-> Special ticket passes to pre-screenings in LA and New York
-> Interviews with celebrities and directors

PR

Since the site has literally thousands of professionally written reviews and high quality content, the site has a lot of great PR. There are literally hundreds of pages of PR from 3-5, perhaps easily over a thousand, and there are probably around 50 PR6 pages. Take a look around the site for yourself to see.

Backlinks

Google: 892
MSN: 2,057
Yahoo: 59,719

The Forum

Threads: 2,120
Posts: 31,357
Members: 944

Site Members

Movie Vault has a member system which isn't used much, but is there for a bit of customization and functionality. For example, in order for people to play Name That Flick, they must be logged in.

1738 Members
967 Newsletter Subscribed Members

Members' e-mails can be easily mass-mailed to for possible marketing/advertising purposes. There is also the 1000-member base on the forum.

FAQ

Why are you selling?

I run a lot of sites, and Movie-Vault was my first site. I have a lot of emotion and time invested into the site, but in order to administer and grow it properly, it needs more dedication that I'm able to give it now. I used to watch a lot more movies and was a lot more interested in film when I started the site 6 years ago.

Right now I'm basically "keeping the site alive", but am not actively growing it. The site needs an energetic and driven person to get it going again.

Personally, I'd recommend a few things:

1. Market it. The site needs to get it's name out and get link trading again. Traffic has dwindled partly because nobody

knows about it!

2. SEO the site. I believe that remapping the review URL's from

http://www.movie-vault.com/reviews/tksMeWwKDAqtwINl to http://www.movie-vault.com/reviews/clerks_2

would do the site WONDERS.

3. Establish a stronger review team. Over time, most of my reviewers have left the site. At one point we had around 15 active reviewers, right now we only have a few active reviewers.

Will you help the buyer after the sale?

I'd help as much as I could in the transfer of the site, but it should be noted that since the site is so custom made, that there may be some issues I'd have difficulty with such installing the HTML::Template Perl module. However, I'd request help of my programmer if needed.

Once the site is working on the buyer's server, I'd help with any site-specific help, such as if the buyer needed help finding out how to edit a staff members name or how to mass mail members, etc.

Why are you asking for much more than the site makes?

I really hate when people slap a simple 12-18 month revenue mark on a site and close their minds to anything other than that formula. Sure, that works for a turnkey site or a site that is brand new, but for such a premium and established site as Movie-Vault I find it insulting.

If you can't see the potential and value in this site over what it's currently making, then you shouldn't be bidding on it.

Important Notes to Buyer

The winning bidder on this site would sort this out with me in more detail before purchasing, but there are a few things we'd have to agree upon, such as:

1. Agreeing to leave current paid advertisers (only text links) on the site until their campaigns end, to honor their paid agreement with the site.

2. Leave all reviewer names and reviews, interviews, articles in tact (not to be plagaurised as somebody elses name, for example).

3. The forum comes with the site, but the buyer will need to purchase their own license as vBulletin makes it very difficult to transfer licenses now. It costs $160 for a lifetime license.

It should also be noted that the buy should have a good working knowledge of MySQL and Perl, or have access to hired help that does. While the site is 95% working perfectly, some parts of the site could use upgrading or completion.

An example is that some URL's to the administrator fuctions currently aren't linked anywhere and are just typed in via a URL.

Again, the site pretty much runs itself; reviewers can be added and then can log in and submit and edit reviews, but it should be noted that it's still rusty in some areas. I'm brutally honest and like to be up front with everything so don't think it's falling apart, because it certainly isn't. I've spent many thousands of dollars on getting the site programmed and upgraded throughout the years.

Payment Details

Payment can be accepted via Bank Wire, although I'd be willing to go through an Escrow service as well.

If you're interested, please contact me at or by MSN Messenger at or by AIM at AmishFBI - do not PM me here as I rarely check PM's.

Thanks!


P.S. I also own MovieForums.org which I'd be willing to sell with Movie-Vault for an additional fee if interested.

 

I thought you sold this website already Tyler, sale fell through?

 

Nice site, but 40K starting bid is too high. Don't even see how you can justify it

 

It sounds like a nice site, but you appear to be selling it at a price equivalent to 10 years revenue??

 

I couldn't see myself offer anywhere near $40k when the site makes under 10k a year? I know you worked hard on it, but income matters on sales. Please PM if you looking for lower.

 

Guys, please don't post if you aren't interested in bidding.

kip - No thanks. There's a reason I made $40,000 the minimum bid.

 

If you don't want people to post except for bidding, you shouldn't have created a thread here at DP.

 

Sigh... *shakes head*

 

Might want to hire a broker?

 

A site supposedly worth "mid 5-digit range" with 4 pop up windows. Tut.

 

Since when did people base a site on 12months revenue, that would be completely stupid. The reason why the starting bid is high is because there is a LOT of potential here, especially since it is an old site, so I really can't see how the whole 12month thing comes into place.

 

Not much to respond to here as I believe I've covered everything I wanted to say in my original post...

But yeah - as much as you guys love to place a simple pricing formula on website, you must admit it doesn't work for everything. The high price is made up of mostly the established fact of it and the potential. I mean, 2150 professionally written reviews.. if you price them at $25 which is far below what they're worth because of their quality, that's $50,000 right there if you were to have that outsourced.

Anyhow, you either want the site or you don't. There's no way I'm selling the site for $7,000

 

Fair enough. But the problem with paying for "potential" is that the potential has to be realised! If it was that easy to promote the site and/or increase the earnings you'd have done it already.

Putting time and effort into it costs money. What's your estimate on how much of time and money would be needed to take the earnings up, and by how much would they rise? It's a simple business decision, if I invest $60K now how much more do I need to invest before the asset is earning at its full capacity, and what would that capacity be?

I post only because I like the site, I have $60K I could spend, but I can't see a clear way/time frame to recovering my investment.

Trust me, I'd have even more difficulty than you would. Would you be open to a deal at BIN that ties you to running/developing the site on a contract basis?

 

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/11/21/movie-vault-nintendo-wii-domains-and-other-stuff-for-sale/

 

Tyler, what are the costs of running/maintaning this site?

 

I never stated (correct me if I'm wrong) that it would be "easy" to promote the site or increase earnings, however I'll have to contest your statement that "I would have done it already". I used to work on the site a lot a few years ago, and put a LOT of time and effort into growing it. It did well and grew slowly but steadily.

However over the past couple years, especially the last year, I've had my hand in so many projects that I couldn't dedicate the time to Movie Vault. I also started to grow a bit 'tired' of it, or rather, more interested in launching new ventures.

I won't give an estimate as to how much time and money it would take, because I believe that is highly dependant on how the owner does things, but I will tell you what I'd do if I put some time and money into it:

The backend code functions, but is very old code that has mostly been patched and modified to death (with the exception of a few areas which are pretty new and programmed very well, such as the News area). I'd invest in making it more efficient and easier for staff.

For example, instead of staff having to manually enter Amazon ASIM code for DVD's, the site would use Amazon API to dynamically grab the corrent data.

Secondly I'd SEO the site. It has very poor SEO now. Starting with the reviews, and moving onto other areas as well such as interviews, etc. The only reason I don't do that now is that it's rather tricky the way the site is set up now.

Lastly, I'd get more volunteer staff again and get more content to the site (namely news) and do a bit of marketing of the site.

I may be open to such a position for a transitional purpose only. Since I know how the site functions and operates and to slowly help the owner take ownership of it and such, but other than something like that I wouldn't be interested unless I got paid quite handsomely as part of the reason I'm selling the site is to give myself more time to allocate into other projects...

However, it should be noted that I've only been putting in around an hour a week (at the most) running and operating the site for the past 2 years or so since it's the staff that do all the real work...

 

There is absolutely no costs other than of course domain fees ($8 a year and I believe it doesn't expire for a few years) and hosting.

I have two dedicated servers now and run a couple dozen sites on them and Movie Vault is one of them. It'd run fine if you put it on your own dedi.

Other than that I don't pay anything, not a single thing.

The only things I've spent money on in the past have been lots of outsourced programming on the site for upgrades/improvements, and sometimes holding 'staff' contests to generate more reviews/news, etc.

 

Just curious if you've no time for the site, who reviews the new movies? Do you get RSS feeds, or are no new movies being reviewed?

Have you thought about a profit share with someone who puts up some money and does the work, but you retain some of the profit also?

Have you thought about hiring someone to SEO the site and promote it for you as it seems that's what you're asking a new buyer to do for this "potential". If I knew it had potential, I'd hire someone and keep the site as it's a win-win for you.

I really like the site and the idea, but unless you can show me the potential ( by either hiring someone to do the work for you in the next two months to get the income up, or promote it and do the work yourself), I find it an investment that is too high in both time and cash outlay as it stands presently, but that's JMO.

 

The volunteer staff reviews the movies, write the news, etc. I only handle certain areas of the site that I haven't had automated yet, such as editing the index.shtml page to add new photos and links of the latest movies in the Featured Reviews area (right side of front page).

I don't have any RSS feeds on the site.

As for profit sharing, I believe Jon (Mook-Jon) offered such a deal but I declined. I either want full ownership of the site or none at all. I don't really want to be around when it's 'gutted'.

As for hiring somebody to reprogram and SEO it - well that takes time and money, which I do not have. Eventually I'll do this if I hang onto the site, but Movie Vault is definitely on the 'back burner' for me as I'm working on my other projects right now.

 

Q: Is the code behind this site custom or is it part of some other framework? If it is custom what is the current relationship with the original programmer?

Perl is a bit too legacy imo so I think its pretty obvious that the site would need a complete overhaul to potentially realize any profits above what you have made. Especially considering the niche's competition. It's not like you didn't try at all to monetize either