Premium Site: Movie-Vault.com I am relisting this up for sale again several months several months after last putting it up for sale. I have lowered my asking price and am sure it will bring in many interested buyers again. I have made minor adjustments (mostly statistical and income updates) to the description 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 near our asking price. Movie Vault has plateaued in both traffic and income for quite a while now since I've been so busy with my other 20+ other sites. I spend around an average of 30-minutes 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 Starting Bid: $35,000 BIN: $45,000 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 2200 movies -> Popular "Name That Flick" 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: $4,681 2007-to-date: $798 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. I calculated the following a few months ago and they were from the previous 12 months at the time: Amazon: $120 Allposters: $100 Casale: $150 TribalFusion: $380 ValueClickMedia: $500 AdSense: $1200 Text-Link-Ads: $200 Total: $2,650 2006 Private Ad Sales: $4,681 Grand Total 2006: $7,331 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 also 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: 548 MSN: 341 Yahoo: 26,704 AltaVista: 14,400 AllTheWeb: 6,510 Total: 48,503 The Forum Threads: 2,317 Posts: 35,678 Members: 1,059 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 the code is very poorly written in some areas and could use a lot of cleaning up. 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 the buyer pays the fees. 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 price if interested. It's #2 on Google for "Movie Forums".
Wow, I'd love to have this but don't think I'm ready for that kind of commitment. Good luck with the sale though.
Heh, that negative rep was by a spammer on one of my forum posting contests. I asked DigitalPoint to fix it but they never responded. I'm a pretty public person and am not worried about my reputation in terms of transactions. If anyone wants any referrals or wants to talk to me over the phone they can e-mail me.