eBaum’s World Finds a Buyer
eBaum’s World, a viral video site that has been on the block for a while now, is being bought by HandHeld Entertainment for $15 million in cash and a potential earn-out of about $50 million over the next three years.
Along with the purchase comes some interesting data about eBaum’s World’s revenue-to-visitor ratio, something that’s rarely public for video sites. According to today’s press release, the site generated $5.2 million in revenue and $1.6 in net income before taxes in 2006. The stated traffic figures are not exactly in the most easy-to-comprehend terms — 2.5 billion page views “during the past 12 months.”
We asked comScore for an outside estimate were told the site had 2.3 million U.S. unique video viewers in June who watched a total of 25.6 million videos. So, in very rough terms, Handheld is paying about $6.50 per unique. Update: eBaum’s World PR says the site has an average of 10 million unique visitors per month. Unfortunately these discrepancies are pretty normal on the web!
eBaum’s World, launched in 1998, is run by Eric Bauman and his dad Neil Bauman. It has generated some grumbles in from content creators for posting and re-branding other people’s content and not being terribly receptive to their takedown requests.
Shares of HandHeld Entetainment jumped this morning, but are now trading down a cent at $1.8099. Last time we wrote about the company, it was because it had bought another video site, Putfile.
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Hi Liz,
Actually I wouldn’t be surprised if both numbers were “true”. The problem with comScore is that they are estimating based on what piece of the internet they “see” as is Alexa or Compete.
The only way I think to really know, without coding up a massive system to weed out bot traffic and “page views” is to use Google Analytics. And the data there is private to the site owner.
Our numbers from them are much better than any of the three public stats, because they only see a part, but we talk about the public numbers with people because they can see those and they can’t see Google Analytics.
Flawed as they are, we find Alexa to be closest to what is real right now on a day to day basis.
mary
mary hodder on August 3rd, 2007 at 8:58 am - Permalink
That’s really interesting, Mary. But I wish there could be one truth.
Liz Gannes on August 3rd, 2007 at 10:25 am - Permalink
Hi Liz,
To add to what Mary said, HandHeld Entertainment sources Google Analytics on the news release that went out about the announcement. That’s where the PR guy (since it was me) got the information he sent you.
We agree, the discrepancies are confusing at best, but as Mary said, Google Analytics attached directly to the site is the most accurate tool to gauge traffic on the Web site.
Jon
Jon on August 3rd, 2007 at 10:48 am - Permalink
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