@Kidavenger said:
@mosespippy said:
CBS is a publicly traded company so we get some financial reports from time to time. Today is the day their quarterly report was released. Here is an excerpt from page 40
Investing Activities. Cash used for investing activities of $140 million for the three months ended March 31, 2012 principally reflected capital expenditures of $39 million, payments for acquisitions of $69 million primarily reflecting the acquisitions of a television station and a radio station, and investment in investee companies of $34 million. Cash used for investing activities of $103 million for the three months ended March 31, 2011 principally reflected capital expenditures of $41 million, payments for acquisitions of $53 million, primarily for internet businesses, and investments in investee companies of $26 million.
I'm certain that not all of the stated $53 million was for giant bomb/comic vine but I would wager that a large chunk of it was. If you look at last years annual report it shows that CBS paid 107 million for the acquisition of internet businesses (page 294 of annual report for date ended Dec 31, 2011). So they spent half of what they did last year in just the first three months of this year.
Note: I just glanced through the filings. There could be more specific information or other relevant information included that I have not found.
These sites have to generate a positive income to be worth anything more than the value of the domain name; I think it's pretty clear that none of them were accomplishing this and that's why whiskey media were actively soliciting offers for months before the sale. I would be surprised if any of the sites sold for more than $100k with tested likely pulling in the most. Giantbomb is worthless without Jeff/Ryan/Brad/Vinny, a huge portion of the acquisition cost would be signing those guys to long-term contracts; imagine those guys left in a year from now and started largebomb.com, nobody would stay here, it would end up just like Screened.
The fact that 15 to 25% of giant bomb's traffic comes from search results says otherwise. People do a search, get the wiki in the results and come to the site and get served an ad. There is no need for any of the staff in that equation. Comic Vine gets roughly the same traffic but even more of it comes from search. CBSi also gets user data from the acquisition which they can sell wholesale or use to better target their ads which makes their ads more valuable.
Part of the cost is also the cost of purchasing an established brand. Why did facebook buy instagram for $1 Billion when they could have just coppied it? It wasn't to hire the 4 people who work at instagram. It was because instagram already has a grip on the market and it would have been cheaper to buy them than to create and market an equally successful competitor. They want to advertise to the established audience and CBS wants to do the same with Giant Bomb.
The other three whiskey media sites likely went for less because their audience is smaller so there is less advertising value. They likely got some extra value since the wiki technology went with them but that is not worth as much in the long run.
One of the reasons Whiskey Media was likely losing money was because they were not established enough to get large scale advertising deals. CBS is a huge corporation that has been in advertising for decades. When they talk to other corporations about ads they are listened to.
As for your $100k valuation, if you look at the subscriber numbers and the cost of a subscription and the fact that 98% of subscriptions came from giant bomb then $100k is easily exceeded for giant bomb.
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