CBS Acquires High School Sports Site
Michael Arrington
19 comments »
CBS announced the acquisition of MaxPreps, the largest high school sports site, earlier today.
The acquisition price was not disclosed, but we’re digging. We’re hearing that the company was asking for $20+ million.
Comscore says MaxPreps has about 674,000 unique monthly visitors and 14 million month page views. Traffic is way down from a year ago - March 2006 showed 26 million page views.
MaxPreps raised $8.5 million in capital from DFJ Frontier, BEV Capital and Dolphin Equity. The Company is located near Sacramento, California.
Good pickup by CBS/CBS Sportsline. They’re trying to compete directly with ESPN and the Rivals.com sports network (which has been around forever).
About $30 bucks per unique. Is that high? Low?
I think that number is just about par from what i’ve seen in the past. This is a good pickup for CBS, not sure how the VC’s turned out on an $8.5MM investment.
hm… here’s a super dumb question - what does 674,000 unique monthly visitors mean?
Does it mean 674,000 different people (IP addresses?) each month?
Or does it mean 674,000/30=22,467 people come there every single day of the month?
Asked another way, if I have 1,000 uniques every day for 30 days, do I have 1,000 uniques in the month, or 30,000 uniques that month?
I imagine there’s a mix somewhere in there… anyone know?
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
Jason — it should mean 674,000 unique IPs, but like you said, it’s sometimes a mix. This distinction is important when digging into unique visitor numbers. For example I launch a site and will report traffic after two days:
Day 1: I get 1,000 unique visitors (meaning that 1,000 people with unique IPs came to my site)
Day 2: I get 1,500 unique visitors, but 500 of those visitors are people who also visited on Day 1 (as recorded by IP, cookie, etc…)
In terms of counting unique visitors, I COULD say that I’ve had 2,500 aggregate daily unique visitors, but in reality I’ve only had 2,000 MONTHLY unique visitors (1,000 from Day 1 and 1,500 minus 500 from Day 2).
Make sense?
Jason,
I see JibberJobber has Google Analytics installed. The monthly uniques stat that is always thrown around can be taken from Analytics.
Login to your analytics acct, click the site you want the stats for, expand “marketing optimization”, expand “unique visitor tracking”, select “absolute unique visitors”, set the time frame to the month you’re looking for.
Compete estimates that it will be around 2k for Feb 2007- http://snapshot.compete.com/jibberjobber.com
@Michael
Shhhh…your not supposed to mention Sacramento. Dont make us send our catering crew over there…..
1st rule of building a startup in Sacramento is your not supposed to mention Sacramento
2nd rule of building a startup in Sacramento, is your NOT supposed to mention Sacramento.
3rd rule of bootstrapping in Sacramento, is that if we are mentioned frequently on TC or elsewhere our talent and engineers get recruited to SV/SF, only to return when the bubble goes limp, taps out or bursts.
4th rule of bootstrapping in Sacramento is try and talk to local Angels and VC’s before you have to drive to Menlo Park
5th rule of building a startup in Sacramento is it costs even less here.
6th Rule of building a startup in Sacramento is build something with a product and value, you cant sell a burn rate man.
7th Rule of Sacramento start ups is you can bootstrap as long as you have to.
8th Rule of Sacramento startups is, if this is your first start up here, you will probably be doing another…
Grats to the MaxPreps team, they’ve been at it awhile. Always good to see other local teams making good.
PS: There is no Sacramento Startup Club, and if there were we deny its existence.
how does this site compare w/ Takkle? eTeamz?
I think this is a quality acquisition.
High school sports is big within the teen life.
but from a high of 26M page views/month last year to a now down of 14M?
that’s Too drastic - that’s definitely a thorn on your side
Peter- MaxPreps is just a content publisher- basically just for football and basketball stats. Limited in terms of all sports. My kid is a high school bball player and likes MaxPreps but is now addicted to the Takkle site which is more social netwoking for all athletes not just football so all his friends are getting on it. I think it just launched in Decemebr w Sports Illustrated or ESPN as a partner.
eTeamz is a team site but I think its for younger kids. It controls the registration process and has a good model.
high school sports is impossible to find on the web, good market availibility there
But a site generating just 14m pageviews per Month is totally nothing. How can a site with such low traffic be worth $20+ Million?
We’re in a bubble if this site really got sold for $20+ Million…
@DV - thank you - it absolutely makes sense and that is what I thought it was - but I was wondering if that’s how the Arrington’s and VC of the world see it, or how they define it. I agree with you (stats are funny things, eh?)
@Miller - EXCELLENT - thank you. I have not monkeyed around with Google analytics and usually just see the default stats - but this is very meaningful data.
And I won’t even go into my beefs with Compete/Alexa etc. as far as accuracy… that’s for another forum.
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
@Michael
As far as they’re traffic is concerned I’ve been told by a reliable source, that its up nearly 3x over the last year. Once again the Comscore/Alexa accuracy issue rears its ugly head…..
So the valuation relects not only traffic, but market opprotunity/market penetration and position I imagine.
Tom Rutledge,
I’ve seen you post before about Takkle on Mashable so I’m wondering what your connection to the co. is?? Your posts there give the impression that you have a vested interest. ”I think they launched in December” makes it sound like you just found out about Takkel when I think I have seen you post in every Mashable article about them. What gives??
Jackie Oh. Normally I would say that maybe Tom Rutledge is just enthusiastic about the site. But, when I looked at those comments and the one here, it definitely makes you wonder. I totally agree with your feedback on his statement “I think….”
I think CBS made off like a bandit in the transaction. For $20m , they got a property that can be expanded into a full blown cable network which is a very low cost as it compares to launching a traditional cable launch from scratch. If the web vistors can be converted into to cable viewers, what a gold mine. At that point, the web business is all gravy…
MaxPreps is a member of the Quantified Publisher Program. As such Quantcast has directly measured 1,081,435 unique visitors on a rolling month period.
If you look at the chart you can see February traffic was even stronger.
http://www.quantcast.com/maxpreps.com
Looks like a smart buy for CBS.
– Mark