In late October we reported on well placed rumors that IAC was in talks to acquire movie-centered social network Flixster. Those discussions reportedly stalled, likely over IAC’s preferred deal structure (partial buyout with an option for the rest) and/or Flixster’s declining traffic and visitor count.
Now perhaps, those discussions are back on track. One source says the deal is done. Another says the parties have been in serious discussions over the last couple of weeks and are “very close,” but no deal has been closed. Both agree the price is over the $150 million being discussed last year, and may be as high as $200 million or more. The deal is being structured as a cash plus earnout transaction.
Flixster had an up and down year in 2007. They started off strong (”growing like a weed“) and have grown to 43 million user home pages. Traffic grew to 12 million unique worldwide visitors and 358 million page views in May. But it has fallen since then. In November, Flixster had just 8.2 million visitors and 139 million page views (source: Comscore). Over 1.2 billion movie reviews have been written by users.
Those declining visitor and page view numbers don’t seem to be a concern to IAC, according to our sources. They just like the company and its loyal users.
Flixster, based in San Francisco, raised $2 million in funding in February 2007 from Lightspeed Ventures and a number of angel investors.
I’m expecting to hear more news in the next couple of weeks. With the current information we’ve received, I put a over-under on a deal getting done with IAC at about 66%.
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Not bad with just $2m funding…
Seems a bad time for Flixster to want be negotiating when traffic is falling off. If I was the cynical type, I would think either IAC is blind or Flixster is dumping or both!
Cool Info Man,
358 Million page views wow. Must havegone complacent and agressive to loose such a good position.
Terrific…Polsky deserves all that….he’s amazing
2 into 200 after a year plus is what keeps all those noses to the grindstone, lovely….
Do you know what’s happening with omnidrive?
Hummm, we want to hear the 100% deal on this one, that’s a lot of page view though…
nhick
http://www.itrush.com
well done for
flixter
rc
trading tennis blog
Why in the world would IAC buy a company for $200M that doesn’t have any revenue? It’s not something they normally do.
This shows… yet again… that spamming is profitable.
@#6: Omnidrive..
Haha.. that only shows that Michael is loyal to his friends
@#6: Omnidrive..
mightbe “Very Close” to Being Acquired by http://www.Omnigroup.com (in fact, not a bad idea)…
IAC is pathetic. They buy 3rd and 4th tier services. They need to learn to go big or don’t go at all. What will this site do for them? If you want to be in the game you need to buy a big name just like G bought YT. These YT clones are not going to do anything for the big boys.
Are they going to get Lodwick back?
Damn Bubble 2.0 is in full swing. The tulip mania is starting.
I should quit and start a new social network company - I’ll call it bubbl2 and it will have no business model, no advertising revenue, and pages full of comments like OMG, LOLZ, ROFLMAO and of course spam. In fact any normal comments will be moderated. Then I’ll sell it for 2000000000000000% profit.
@15 the founders of Flixster are actually pretty smart guys who worked very hard for years to make this happen, and have created a valuable service.
you are just jealous of the fact that they are about to make $50M each while you continue to slave away at your little job
@Dyde - not unreasonable..
Having been a frustrated IACI shareholder in the past … my guess is after they acquire it there’d be a year of speculation and consternation by Wall St. analysts about how they might best spin it off
I think Flickster is a great revenue stream, the reveue will just need to be maximized — I think that number of page views is insane and very impressive — It’s all about finding the purple cow isn’t it? I still don’t understand though, Flickster is such a third tier service in comparison to YouTube. IAC Should be going for the biggest fish and the Alexa rating is the best point when buying these companies as well as their SEO/SEM status according to links and number of pages including page rank and site architecture.
I.E. Flickster has 236,000 links and YouTube has 31,300,000 links…. That’s a rather large difference…. Especially concerning their PRs and number of pages as well as loyalty fanbase. IAC may be wasting their money or if those page views are correct, they may be gaining a pretty good foothold…It depends on the outcome of the deal. I would buy it for much less
As an employee of IAC, this is deeply disappointing and is another example of the poor strategic thinking that occurs at HQ. Buying a soon to be irrelevant player with no defensible content, who’s traffic and PV will continue to decline due to their “widget” on Facebook. After the company splits, the quarterly calls are going to be brutal. Short this puppy.
@9
look at all those page views. They have revenue and its real…
This is actually good news from a “lowering insane valuations” standpoint. If Flixster sells for $150 million, including earn-out, as the 10th largest social networking property on the Internet, just ahead of Bebo, that means Bebo’s insanely huge guesstimated valuation of $1 billion is totally off the wall. It means that Bebo can’t realistically sell itself for more than $100 million and their founder bet get his darn head of the clouds. No one’s going to pay $1 billion for the 11th largest social networking website will slow or negative growth prospects.
Cheers,
Doug
it’ll be interesting to see how they will build and improve a movie community while also building and improving on their video community over at vimeo.
@7 had a great chuckle at what your site advertises. Thanks
Oh and cool gadgets.
IAC does seem to bargain shop - but then again, maybe Flixster might be the only game left for getting that many eyeballs. I’m sure their venture capital guys will enjoy the buyout…
boring
Also,
http://learncoldfusion.blogspot.com/
I’ll bet that Flixster’s recent stats are down compared to May because in June they launched their Facebook ‘Movies’ application, which has been installed over 14 million times and has over a million active (daily) users (according to adonomics.com). As a previous user of Flixster, I am now much more likely to access it through the Facebook application because a lot of my Facebook friends also have it, but don’t access Flixster directly.
8 million (November site visits) + 35 million (current monthly Facebook application visits) = a lot more than 12 million (May site visits).
Strange to hear that their traffic is going down, because their Alexa graph looks excellent.
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ixster.com
@#6: Omnidrive..
Some comments today on webworkerdaily.com/2008/01/13/who-protects-your-cloud-data
thsk
I’m sure this has something to do with IAC’s new 3D social gaming venture GarageGames (instantaction.com) - from that angle it might make a bit more sense
Mike,
indeed, flixter has close to 19M global uniques
http://www.quantcast.com/flixster.com
the site is quantified, which means we could take these numbers for real..
based on previous deals, 20M unique visitors per month could command a price close to or even above $200M..
my 2 cents
This is interesting news. It is really one of the first big niche social networks to be listed for high dollar. To note flixster’s competition, there are a few with filmcrave.com bursting onto the scene in late august as having some interesting partners and picking up an OWA (over flixster no less). I am curious to know what this may do to those small/niche social networking sites in terms of their value (cafe mom and others)?
first time TechCrunch visitor– Learning the lingo slowly–
Flixster visitor loyalty appears to be well-earned, whether a deal goes through or not. G in CT