The much anticipated IAC/Flixster acquisition isn’t going to happen, we’ve heard. The two parties got very close to a deal. Then, says a source, IAC summoned Flixster to a meeting in New York where they were told it wasn’t going to happen.
Why fly the company all the way to New York just to reject them in person? It seems like the polite thing to do would have been to just tell them by phone.
The reason for the change of heart? The price, rumored to have ballooned to $200 million or more, just wasn’t supported by Flixster’s declining unique visitor numbers - Flixster went from a high of 12 million monthly uniques in May 2007 to just 6.8 million in December. And IAC chief Diller’s ongoing battle with stockholder John Malone may have caused them to be more cautious with acquisitions.
Whatever the reason, Flixster’s back on the market. With such a hefty price tag, however, they may be there for a long, long time.
Maybe they can call up Jeff Bezos and pitch him this idea of listing movies in a big movies database and giving them a rating.
thats just pure evil . maybe they were hoping flixster guys would lower their pricing.
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http://www.xencasino.com
Its amazing how sites grow and fall so quickly
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Good call IAC.
I’ve seen this movie before — may want to add these guys to the deadpool. The morale of their employees will be extremely low coming out of this and is very hard to overcome.
If somebody offers you a hundred million dollars, you take it… the difference between 100M and 200M is zilch… you can live extremely well for generations to come and make up the difference through various investments (and then some). At the end of the day, it’s the money that is in the bank that counts… not what is “hopefully” requested. Just silly in my opinion.
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
@3 nice pagerank. do something original please.
Doesn’t popularity of the movies app on Facebook alone make flixster worth 6 jillion dollars??
As the old investor’s saying goes — “Pigs get slaughtered.”
@Goldie, #8 — Facebook apps aren’t worth much…even the big dogs. With such low click through and low CPM rates (.12 per 1,000 impressions is considered worth bragging about), the math means that the total value of each App user is worth about $1 AT MOST.
I don’t know why any one would WANT to buy flixster.com, from a user stand point it’s like some one has ruined imdb or rotten tomatoes with bebo.
Comscore sucks - that is why sites use quantcast. Flixster traffic looks pretty strong to me. They jumped from 5M UVs in November to 24M UVs in 3 months.
http://www.quantcast.com/flixster.com/traffic
even if Quantcast (or Compete, or Alexa, or whoever) is superior all that matters is that the advertising community looks at ComScore and NNR. If you can’t win there, you can’t win.
$200M for a 6.8M UUs is not bad, a $30/user. High-priced for sure, but not outside of the range for Web 2.0 companies that have been bought between $15 and $35/UU.
The real problem is how you extract $15-$35 back on a per-user basis over the lifetime of a customer. With a increasing customer base, you’ll dilute the purchase price by new customer (assuming the customer acquisition costs are low). With a stale or declining user base, you do need to get $15-$35 per-user back to break-even.
Most services cannot get that kind of revenue before the customer goes away forever. If you imagine that a customer stays active in a website for 18 months (pretty long for something like Flixster, that is not a “must have”), you need to get at least $0.83 per month per customer. For an Ad-based business, that would mean at least 4 ad clicks (assuming Google Adsense $0.20 RPC) per customer per month! It’s a pretty high bar to set.
Of course, you can offset this with custom advertising (CPM), with affiliate deal or with premium subscription.
@11 Tracking website traffic on the web is tricky. I like compete the best which indicates about 90-80% of the traffic that our internal stats show. Quantcast indicates 300%. I can see why sites would want to use quantcast. Google analytics comes pretty close, but I guess you can’t see that one. Does anyone know of an article that covers each company and their methodology for tracking web metrics?
Haha, that’s what greed does. Finally a smart move from IAC.
Flixster should learn from Marc Cuban. If someone is paying you $$ for nothing, take it and run!!
Agreed that web traffic is hard to measure. But I checked a few different sources, and it appears Flixster traffic/UVs are increasing.
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
I don’t believe this whole line of thinking that Flixster traffic is dropping.
how can i get back on flixtser.com plz
i have 403 errore a
how i can get back on flixtser.com. i dont what happing i would to get back on plz keep has been for bidden. please me a email on this .