The assets of classified listing service Edgeio, a company co-founded by TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington that joined the Deadpool last week, are on the market.
Interested parties can register to bid at Domain-Tools here. Bidding starts at $250,000 and bidders must pre-register to bid. The auction finishes Friday 21 December with payment to be paid via Escrow no later than the end of the year.
Also on the auction block is the assets Adaptive Real Estate Services, a company purchased by Edgeio last year for $200,000. The reserve price for that sale is $150,000 and the same rules apply as for the Edgeio auction.
Also at auction this week is the independent film focused video hosting site YouAre.TV. The founders of the 2 year old site are moving on to a new startup and a keen to sell. The traffic for the site isn’t spectacular but the value would appear to be with the IP which could easily be used on similar sites. The coding utilizes Amazon EC2 so running costs are low, and the site has a number of content deals in place with corporate clients including Verizon. The eBay auction for YouAre.TV can be found here. Bidding starts at $25,000.
Update: all the relevant details on Edgeio for the sale can be found on a wiki here. As several commenter’s note, the wiki makes for interesting reading.
Update 2 (Michael Arrington): One thing I want to make clear is that all of the proceeds, if any, from the sale of edgeio will go to the creditors and preferred stock holders. Common holders, like myself, will not be getting paid and my financial conflict of interest with this company is essentially over.
I’m looking to pick up an Aeron chair. Any good condition ones left?
Arrington, you my friend are a magician. You helped turn 5M in VC into $250,000. Like David Copperfield and the cash in his safe!
I am dissolving mine. I would rather the quiet dignity.
Why didn’t they just liquidate the assets? Did you guys own anything besides IP?
Like computers, desks, chairs, MSDN licenses, Mac Dev stuff?
That stuff can all be liquidated.
Eliot Noss paid $225k for Kiko for Tucows, and look what happened a year later.
http://www.alex...amp;size=Medium
Deadpool IP ain’t worth a single dime.
Sell the chairs buddy. I’m reopening under the same name in a different country. My country.
FWIW, http://wiki.edg...me-edgeioAssets provides a very fascinating look at the intimate details of a startup. Tech roadmaps, patents, traffic reports, docs. Kudos to the transparency.
Funny how when it comes to one of your friends, selling your website on a no-name site auction site, this action is not seen as being the closest thing to just abandoning ship. I was really enjoying your blog but your two-faced attitude towards certain actions just turns me right off. I may no longer be reading TechCrunch because of this hypocrisy. Secondly, if they company is so good, and so valuable then why is it up for sale? You’re using this blog as a way to save face for your editor, and his failed business venture. I think I need to find a new blog to read my tech news from.
why is the currency for the Youaretv auction in Aussie dollars, if the location states NY?
Gavin, if you really want to be disgusted into never reading a blog again, you should read my last articles.
Duncan is trying to help Edgeio with this post. Deadpool IP will never get a bid unless the word gets out. Worst case scenario it pays for some free pizza. Not a bad get. The guys from Kiko got enough cash to do justin.tv, and my little deadpool wonder got me enough cash to create a search engine and a sh1tty office for a couple years.
Question… Do you get to keep full server hosting ?
Because advertising this on TechCrunch isn’t sleazy or anything…
@Chris R, Why doesn’t TechCrunch then give it impartial advertising instead of playing it up like it’s some hot product, which it’s not because they went bankrupt!
46% of edgeio’s traffic comes from TechCrunch, according to the analytics. Will this continue to be the case for whatever sucker buys edgeio??
wait Chris R are you saying your search thing is up for auction now, or is that still going strong? i’m still waiting to try it.
Gavin
I made no comment on the assets of Edgeio one way or the other so how I’ve allegedly played this up is beyond me. It’s interesting because you don’t see these sorts of companies at auction very often, and we also had a significant number of comments/ people (directly) asking about if the assets would be sold. Domain-Tools is also one of the leaders in the domain auction market so it’s beyond me how this is on a no-name auction site.
Lawrence
apologies, the link defaulted to ebay.com.au for me, try this link
> “The coding utilizes Amazon EC2 for storage”
Do you mean Amazon S3 for storage, or EC2 as web-servers ?
Man that is sad to hear. Shocking too. I mean, with the publicity that TC has you would think edgeio would succeed.
But I guess the business plan just wasn’t there.
Best of luck to those now looking for work.
cbmeeks
http://codershangout.com
Will be interesting what the story for this startup is at the end of the year. Will it be bought, by who and for how much?
Jon
The problem with Edgeio. It sound like Porn website or Geocities homepage.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
Pratham (#13)
I’ll take your word for it, although I was quoting that part from an email exchange I had with the owners so can only go on that.
Jon (#15)
very much so, particularly if they can bring it back from the dead.
Anyone see the irony? It’s like a blogger running for office.
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, write. And, presumably, those who take everything on this blog with a grain of salt seem quite justified.
Being a failure does *not* suggest writing about others’ successes and/or failures is worth more than a real journalist.
Gavin Schulz — that is not a no-name website it is being auctioned off of. If you are into Domains, which it doesn’t sound like it, you’d know about it.
Also, perhaps somebody needs to conjure up a secondary market for deadpooled traffic of sorts. Done properly could be a novel idea.
third, somebody buy edgeio and make a damn wordpress plug-in that it easy to use and customize and you might see some value created.
When you buy can you change domain name?
I would like to make a prediction for the fun of it:
Unless there are lots of valuable hard inventory items, like fixtures, furniture and Servers, etc., I don’t think that it will fetch the 250k.
Gut feel.
No wonder Edgeio failed… they were trying to use EC2 for storage!
250K for this crap??
I hope mike come back and attack all venture capital companies who invest startup. I waited one year to find rocky startup that I want to read. Nothing All I get is Facebook and Google wars, and lots of VC funding companies.
Edgeio should offer blip’d videos instead of selling off. You could revive your business in video advertising/classifieds. Check out blipd.com because soon, everyone is going to get blip’d! LAUNCHES TODAY!
http://wiki.edgeio.com has all of the information for interested buyers.
Keith Teare
ceo/edgeio
Does anyone know if the Justin Kan of kiko is the same Justin of junstin.tv fame?
I did a very lengthy video interview of the kiko team that is still on-line, and I think it figured into their sale to Tucows. hmm, where is that post….long tail….ahhhh-ha!
http://bizcast....e_scoop_on.html
I agree with Alaska that Edgeio should be commended for their transparency with the wiki page. Has anyone else looked into their Google Analytics data?
Although I like the transparency, I’m still a little concerned about the privacy issues. Data includes partner’s traffic, keyword searches, etc. I wouldn’t be too happy if I were a partner and this was exposed.
If you look at Dec 1 to Dec 11th, the site (including the network) had 1.4M visits. It was very interesting that Techcrunch brought about 800K and Superherohype.com (who the hell are they anyway, but must have a lot of traffic!) brought 440K – bringing over 80% of the traffic from two sites.
Justin Kan of kiko was a grad student at Harvard. Justin of justin.tv is a moron. So no. They’re no the same person.
Total revenue: $57,071
Total expenses: $3,552,007
I would shut this POS down too
Is there any chance the code base would be shared. I was working on RSS and other content syndication standards library some time ago when edgeio was launched. I was really excited when edgeio was launched.
Its quite an unbelievable burn rate! I still believe that classified aggregation does have a future. It has to happen.
It would be interesting to look at the feed parsers, subscription managers, search algorithms and crawlers for edgeio.
But i guess someone would be paying a lot of money for that!
Amit
After reviewing a number of the docs on the Wiki I found Edgeio to be pretty darn interesting. Perhaps bad timing…
That said. I do agree with Michael that the expense side of the house was just nutz. Talk about putting the cart in front of the horse.
I always find it difficult to understand how VC’s keep their jobs. The board of directors of a company has the fiduciary responsibility for ALL. This includes employees who are common share holders. Spending like drunken sailors is just completely irresponsible. However, since it’s not the VC’s money who cares (that’s the attitude, I guess).
Mike also mentioned that he attempted to keep some sanity on burn. However, he was out voted every time. Hmmm, well looking at the Wiki it only looks like Mike and Keith (ceo) on the Board. Of course, the other Directors have resigned in disgrace. Pathetic! So, who else was on the board? Keith maybe you can tell us which way you voted when it came to managing the burn…..
My heart goes out to the employees at Edgeio who got completed blind sided. Always a nice gesture during the festive Holiday Season. The conversation in short goes like this: “Johnny, how was your weekend..well, I’m glad we didn’t tell you before Thanksgiving because the last thing I wanted to do is ruin your holiday, but, now I’ve got bad news. You are fired. Have a good Christmas andnHappy New Year”
MEMO TO FOUNDERS: Look to cash in “some” chips at any stage of the financing (i.e. series A or get a new generation fund to invest like Founders Fund with FF shares). Once you take money from the devil it’s OVER!!!!
I read thru all the thing in the wiki, there aren’t much assets.
the IP they “File”, a dim a dozen, nothing unique. You can reverse engineering them and tweak it in 15 mins.
The traffic, is it a joke? most of them are widgets from their publishers. Revenue 12K a month? what about expense? 2mil/yr?
except the domain have a PR rank 7, but does it cost 250K?
I think TechCrunch just found a new niche: DeadPool Liquidation Notices. (I’m serious…this could be a great place to find good deals on bits & pieces of IP)
once you paid 250K, you get a 10 years contract with rackspace that you have to pay, no more widget traffic as all theh publisher leaves u. and you have to follow up with those “IP” with all the amendments with your lawyers.
you probably have to relocate to take care of the crap.
if you want all theses, pay me 20K i can make craps like these for you to experience.
I guess that’s more of a convenient way to say, sorry, no open source, don’t expect any..
which, of course, is more than fine.
I know this off topic, sorry, but in connection to the person who said that Justin Kan of Kiko.com was not the Justin Kan of Justin.tv…..you are wrong.
They are the same person – big dummy. Because Emmett Shear is listed next to Justin as the CTO of the justin.tv venture. Same Kiko team.
In the name of Michael Milken… Hmmmm…. I read about you in dan of theives. It says you were caught 1986 “junk bond king” scandal. You were named 458th richest person in the world. Sadly, some people see you as poor role model. With billion dollar fortune, aging times — have you ever done something chartible and create new schools for poor?
If not… Scrooge wannabe… Good luck with christmas ghosts…
Peter
You’re probably taking the piss but you’re right, I’d been sitting on the YouAre.TV sale for a couple of days trying to find the right time to run it. Seeing how or if failed…or no longer loved startups sell is an interesting sport.
holy 60 servers batman. best of luck to everyone from edgeio.
does it really take 60 servers to support 8Mil page views??? how does the math work?
It’s too risky to buy failure product that will not succeed. The forecast sales in 2-10 years could give the owner a heart attack. Many.. Many small business books tell you do not buy an existing product from scretch. Reason for this. You don’t have much of experience understanding search engine, Sales, marketing, etc.
You buy it… Next thing. The software cog up & crashes. How are you going to fix source code that you can’t see or understand everything? You email the Admin or Founder. They don’t have time to fix the problem.
I recommend “edgeio.com” should be purchase by experience user who have knowledge programming skills, debugging, search engine, etc.
Don’t buy this product without exprience…
Please reduce reserve price. I have $23.98 in Paypal account. When can I have admin priviledge….?
who decided to spend 200K on that http://www.aresmls.com site? Michael, you? where is ur judgment skill?
To bad, it is a failure.
Ok, while this is not exactly on topic it is something that has been bothering me for months. Duncan you need to learn how to use apostrophes ( ‘ ).
Above you say “As several commenter’s note..” when it should really say “As several commenters note…”, with no apostrophe.
Mostly, apostrophes are used to denote ownership. For instance: “This is Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch.” If something is plural, no apostrophe is needed.
I bring this up because it is distracting and I think TechCrunch is professional enough and should have high enough standards to strive for mostly correct grammar.
Thank you.
~Robert
@47 Robert,
does Duncan use note as a noun rather than a verb? =) hahaha.
Alexa rank for aresmls.com is 5,129,411
There is no functionality on the site and it seems no one has ever seen it. 150k starting bid, you have got to be kidding me. No need to go to comic clubs anymore.
60 servers to run edgeio.com, no wonder they went under, traffic in that timeframe could have been hosted on 1 dediacted server for $99 a month.
OMG. I have a site generating income for me only 3K / month(not my full time job ) =), and it ranks at 110,000 range at Alexa.
The cost of running it every month is like 150$.
how much should I sell it for? I don’t really want to spend the 2 hrs a week to manage it.