Photo and video sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month. We covered the site’s launch last June.
Pickle is different from a lot of other sharing sites in that it relies heavily on email and mobile phone submissions to personal and shared project pages. It’s essentially a multi-modal service for dumping your content into a bucket of content that you can expose through their widget. The service supports uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site. Scripps plans on incorporating the product into supporting content sharing across their existing lifestyle properties. It was created by an Arlington based company called Incando.
You can see an example of their content sharing widget after the jump (auto-plays).
That is a pretty crazy video. The pain.
you gotta wonder how a site like this can be worth 4.1 million. judging by their alexa the site gets somewhere between 10-20k uniques a day.. and no matter how good their script is i’m guessing it doesn’t cost 1 million to make. even if it did, you could use the other 3 mil to deliver (and retain) a lot more than 10-20k uniques a day.
silly, silly buy.
Moose, they have the traffic. They need the tools. Check out their properties and some of the ugv. good buy. They get it.
maverick, so you’re saying the “tools” are worth 4.1 million? you don’t think they could pay a team of developers to create the same thing for under 4.1 mil?
lets say 1 developer costs 100k a year. that means you could have a team of 40 working for you for a whole year. i’m pretty sure they’d be able to produce something better than pickle.com
To each their own though..
i agree… I don’t see what’s worth 4.1 million.
First off, I was expecting a pickle : (
&
I’m not EVEN getting into the “value” debate about this company.
ONLY 4.1 mil? Wasn’t youtube gotten control of for a billion and a half? Drop in the bucket yall. Sounds like either this company isn’t popular or highway robbery.
-mp
“They get it.”
May or may not be a good buy, but anyone who uses the phrase “they get it” most decidedly does not “get it.”
MarshallPeck, it’s hard to even take your post seriously. By your logic any video site is instantly worth a few million because youtube sold for 1.65 billion. That’s .. wow, just wow.
I run a couple of large video sites.. I know what I’m talking about. I expected more from TC regulars though. :/
for visiting.
I’m not sure why this is only Scripp’s “second web purchase”. They have also acquired Shopzilla/Bizrate, uSwitch and UpMyStreet in the last few years…
It seems like a wise investment to me. Scripps Networks gets over 16 million uniques per month. This is surely a technolgy buy for them and will leverage their traffic to build the pickle brand. As for the cost versus build, sure it might be able to be built in a year for a million or so but what are the opportunity costs lost within that one year?
I have been tracking 250+ video sharing / social networking properties for the last few months. Buyers are paying for one of the following three things 1) Technology 2) Users 3) Team because there are no video sharing sites that are making any meaningful revenue from video or contextual advertising yet.
Video ring tones will be the next acquisition driver of established video sharing communities like http://www.livedigital.com. Vringo and Twango are recent examples of this new trend. Why? Because carriers are the billing platform and you no longer need to base your business model around advertising against user generated content.
Good investment, yet another drop in the bucket though…There are just SO many video sites out there, it’s as though every video site gets millions of visitors per month…Very odd, niche content and sites need to become extended like these platforms of content…
I guess the best way to monetize on Web 2.0/pre-3.0 is to build platforms for various aspects of media consumption as well as advertising platforms….
hi nice post, i enjoyed it