Who the fuck are Internet Brands? And why do they want my forum?

bcc423

bcc423

все муда
Dec 16, 2008
667
17
0
I just received an e-mail from someone at "Internet Brands, Inc." saying they want to acquire my forum.

I'm not really looking to sell, and usually just delete e-mail like that without responding. Most of such requests come from low-ballers who are looking for bargains. But I've heard/read that name "Internet Brands" on multiple occasions.

Has anyone sold anything to those guys? Are they legit?
 


btw - if you decide to entertain an offer from them, check out what they paid for other sites (multiple of rev, multiple of profits, value per unique, etc.)
 
Hmm, thanks for info. I did look them up, and they seem to be legit. Definitely not some flippa wannabies.

btw - if you decide to entertain an offer from them, check out what they paid for other sites (multiple of rev, multiple of profits, value per unique, etc.)
Click to expand...
Hmm, where would I find that info? I checked their financials, but didn't find such specific numbers.

Their market cap is $600M, with claimed audience of 69M unique visitors (no info on visit sessions), 700M pageviews per month.

My forum gets 200K uniques, 700k visit sessions, 12M pageviews per month. So I have a much higher pageviews per visitor ratio than their average, which might or might not be a good thing.

If their business model relies on acquiring properties, then there are two ways of calculating the sale price as a percentage of their market cap.

If we go by uniques, then it's 0.2M/69M*$600M=$1.7M which is way too low for me to sell.
If we go by the pageviews, then it's 12M/700M*$600M=$10M which is way too high for them to buy.

I won't go by the revenue multiple because I'm not monetizing the site in the way it's meant to be monetized. (yet) That's why I said that I'm not planning on selling it. It hasn't reached its prime yet and growing at 10-15%/mo.

In any case, thanks for the info. I guess I can talk to them and see what they can offer.
 
bcc423 said:
Hmm, thanks for info. I did look them up, and they seem to be legit. Definitely not some flippa wannabies.

Hmm, where would I find that info? I checked their financials, but didn't find such specific numbers.

Their market cap is $600M, with claimed audience of 69M unique visitors (no info on visit sessions), 700M pageviews per month.

My forum gets 200K uniques, 700k visit sessions, 12M pageviews per month. So I have a much higher pageviews per visitor ratio than their average, which might or might not be a good thing.

If their business model relies on acquiring properties, then there are two ways of calculating the sale price as a percentage of their market cap.

If we go by uniques, then it's 0.2M/69M*$600M=$1.7M which is way too low for me to sell.
If we go by the pageviews, then it's 12M/700M*$600M=$10M which is way too high for them to buy.

I won't go by the revenue multiple because I'm not monetizing the site in the way it's meant to be monetized. (yet) That's why I said that I'm not planning on selling it. It hasn't reached its prime yet and growing at 10-15%/mo.

In any case, thanks for the info. I guess I can talk to them and see what they can offer.
Click to expand...

damn, never realized a forum could be worth that much. congrats bro
 
damn, never realized a forum could be worth that much. congrats bro
Click to expand...
Well, anything is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay. On paper, it's not worth more than a multiple of revenue.

But here is something to think about. Imagine you run a forum in a small (but lucrative) niche. Once you get to a point where you dominate the niche (your forum is by far the largest in the niche, which is the case with me) you become the mouthpiece for new products and services. You have access to the most active consumers in the niche. Each one of such consumers/users networks with dozens more like-minded people offline.

So if some vendor wants to release a new product, they can either spend hundreds of thousands on an awareness campaign or they can just contact such forum owner and start a big buzz about the new gadget. From there on, people will talk about it and within a few weeks every consumer in that niche will know about it.

That's the true power of a niche forum. Of course, the niche has to have certain properties for things to work out in the way I described. It can't be done with just any niche out there. But yeah, forums rule. I stopped pimping out affiliate products with a classical model of traffic->lander->merchant some time ago and never looked back.
 
bcc423 said:
Well, anything is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay. On paper, it's not worth more than a multiple of revenue.

But here is something to think about. Imagine you run a forum in a small (but lucrative) niche. Once you get to a point where you dominate the niche (your forum is by far the largest in the niche, which is the case with me) you become the mouthpiece for new products and services. You have access to the most active consumers in the niche. Each one of such consumers/users networks with dozens more like-minded people offline.

So if some vendor wants to release a new product, they can either spend hundreds of thousands on an awareness campaign or they can just contact such forum owner and start a big buzz about the new gadget. From there on, people will talk about it and within a few weeks every consumer in that niche will know about it.

That's the true power of a niche forum. Of course, the niche has to have certain properties for things to work out in a way I described. It can't be done with just any niche out there.
Click to expand...

That's very true. Although, I wouldnt be able to run a forum if it wasnt something that interested me.
 
I wish I could actually get a forum rollin' I just never could get one with traction haha.
Click to expand...

Don't you have software that does it? :)
 
nice. yeah I run a forum with 20k users / 200k posts, but it basically has been dead for quite awhile now. it was based around that game Spore, but unfortunately it flopped. We got the large amount of our activity/members BEFORE the game released, since it was a fansite dedicated to it 2 yrs prior the release.. damn shame the game sucked :[ if it was anywhere near as big as WoW I could probably be banking from it now.
 
selling a forum to IB could be a great move. do NOT trash the email.

they've got very deep pockets and who knows what 'stupid' (to you or I) investment goal/need they have which may have them overpay what to them is peanuts for a forum.
 
i need to get a forum going in 2011. To get one going dont you have to talk to yourself for a long time to make it look active

congrads on your success
 
bcc423 said:
Hmm, where would I find that info? I checked their financials, but didn't find such specific numbers.
Click to expand...

As is my MO for a Friday night, I decided to procrastinate and do some digging. I read a quote stating that INET doesn't publish specific acquisition numbers, but from perusing their financials, they stated:

• Acquisitions . Acquisitions of vertically-focused websites have been and will continue to be a material component of the expansion of our Consumer Internet business. In 2009 we reduced our total capital investment in acquisitions to $19.9 million, from $62.6 million in 2008. We have refined our acquisition strategy as we have accelerated the organic growth rates of existing websites and rapidly integrated acquired websites onto our operating platform. We anticipate that we will continue to acquire websites and related technologies in 2010 on a similar pace as 2009, subject to our ability to identify assets that meet our growth objectives on favorable terms.

In 2009, they completed 18 website acquisitions, only 7 of which are listed by their 2009 press releases.

1. healthnews.org
2. vasectomy.com
3. businessmart.com
4. businessfinance.com
5. kidscamps.com
6. finweb.com
7. smallbusinessnotes.com

There was another release in early 2010 announcing an additional 7 properties, so that may be included in their 2009 figures. You can probably get a ballpark idea of what they are paying by crunching numbers based on the above.
 
If I am not mistaken, Internet Brands is the same company that bought out Honda-tech.com (450k members) like 3-4 years ago and the custom forum software they ran... until legal disputes went nuts over the forum software. It was the same soft that ran the VWVortex.com (575k members) forums as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom