Large Established Movie Review Site For Sale

Tyler · #1 10-30-2006, 06:09 PM

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 or by AIM at AmishFBI - do not PM me here as I rarely check PM's.

Thanks!