Large Established Movie Review Site For Sale

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Tyler

Tyler

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Premium Site: Movie-Vault.com

Introduction

I am selling my pride and baby Movie-Vault.com. Please note that I am not
aggressively selling this but am putting it up on the market to see if there are any decent offers. I do not plan on selling
it under the mid $xx,xxx range and am looking for offers in the mid-high $XX,XXX or $1XX,XXX range. Please do not make an
offer if you are not willing to pay within this range. Serious buyers only please.

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 some of the main features of the site:

-> Professionally written reviews of 2146 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

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 spiders. 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.

Income

The site is not living up to it's potential (explained below in the FAQ section) but below are the private ad revenue income.
This 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 has also used FastClick, AdSense, Amazon and
Allposters Affiliates, Tribal Fusion, etc.

A tally I came up with from the past 6 months came to:

Private Ads: $4,023
Amazon: $45
Allposters: $110
Casale: $110
TribalFusion: $238
Misc: $100
Sub-Total: $4,626

So, obviously the site isn't making a lot. Even though, I attribute this to a decrease in traffic, which would be the main
challenge of the buyer. I still believe the site to be worth much more than a simple 12 x month equation due to an extreme
number of factors, many listed above.

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: 2,086
Posts: 30,447
Members: 917

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

FAQ

Why are you selling?

I'm not actively selling the site, but am opening myself to offers now. Basically, I'm in no hurry to sell the site but will
sell the site if there is interest in it.

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 handful of 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 10-12x revenue mark on a site. That really insults me. Sure, that works for a turnkey
site, or a site that is brand new, but for such a 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 don't deserve to buy it
anyway.

Important Note 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 in tact (not to be plagaurised as somebody elses name, for example).


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 a upgrading. 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 on getting the site programmed and upgraded
constantly.

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 tylercruz.com or by MSN at twcruz@hotmail.com[/EMAIL">twcruz@hotmail.com"]twcruz@hotmail.com
or by AIM at AmishFBI - do not PM me here as I rarely check PM's.

Thanks!
 


120+K for a site that makes only 4-5K a year on average?...lol

There are tons of movie review sites out there. You have original content but that alone doesn't justify the price.

Sorry but you site could fetch about 40K which is fair. You should be happy with that.

It would be also hard setting up the income. If you income is derived from 6 different sources it becomes less reliable and redundant.
 
Tyler said:
2004: $3,125
2005: $7,152
2006-to-date: $4,023

...

I've spent many thousands on getting the site programmed and upgraded
constantly.
Click to expand...
How much is "many thousands"? Was there any profit in the end?
 
Many thousands is difficult to calculate over a 6 year period. I'd guess I threw a good 8,000 or so, very rough estimate, into total programming and design work of the site over 6 years.
 
Dude,

A nice site like this, and the traffic you are getting, you should be making much more that what you are, or have been.

For example, if you promoted Blockbuster online movie rental for instance, we currently payout $40 for a Free Trial, and you get 200,000 uniques per month, even at a 1 percent click through rate, (200,000 x .01 = 2000 clicks), and 5% conversion rate (2000 clicks x .05 = 100), that would be 100 leads per month at $40 per lead. Thats an additional $4000 in revenue per month... based on VERY conservative numbers.
 
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Interesting to see you putting this on the block Tyler, any reasons for it? Also, are the rising bids from WF or from other sources?

You could be making a shitload more with the site, but I guess your other properties are more valuable and demand more time spent on them, so I understand the neglect of this one. Even though the price you are looking for is more heart and love of the site, rather than actual value, it does have A LOT of potential to make at least $250k a year. That can be with both combined ad sales and affiliate marketing.

Anyone who buys this at less than $100k is getting it for a bargain. Sites don't normally sell with 200k uniques a month for that amount. If I had the time for it and the will, I would definitely consider purchasing it, but I am beyond those days unfortunately.

Goodluck on the sale Tyler, and kudos to whomever wins it.
 
Thanks Jon.

One bid was from Sitepoint, and the other from a guy who contacted me privately (didn't ask where he heard about it).

As stated in my original description, while Urchin states 200,000 uniques a month, I believe it's actually much lower as AdSense and other sources don't compare at all. I believe the uniques are genuine, but composed mostly of spiders which is misleading, so any bidders will need to be aware of this.

Nevertheless though, it is indeed a good bargain. If you be extremely conservative and price each review at $25 (far below what most of them are worth), that's 2100*$25=$52,000 for the reviews alone.
 
Current bid at $50,000, currently negotiating details. Still open to higher offer but will probably be sold within 48 hours.
 
Yea, nice advices indeed. I can completely understand why he askes 50k-100k. I wouldn't sell less either. Potential of that site is incredible. Like CoRegisteer said, you can pretty much get something like 10k/month with small effort.
 
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