YouAreTV Seeks Buyer

YouAreTV, a video community site, has put itself up for sale on eBay. The company claims a fairly weak 19,000 monthly uniques, 56,000 page views and 23,000 view views. With no bids yet, YouAre Media is trying to rustle up press coverage by sending around email pitches with abandon — much to Silicon Alley Insider’s glee.

When YouAre Media CEO David Dundas emailed today, we asked him a few follow-up questions. Below are edited excerpts from our email conversation:

NewTeeVee: Can you explain to me a little bit more about why you decided to put the company up for sale?

David Dundas: Well just to clarify — we are really putting youare.tv as a site up for sale. The separate company, YouAre Media, was started to focus more broadly on social media.

As we mention in our blog, we have a very fervent community whose needs we haven’t really been able to keep up with, from a development perspective.

NewTeeVee: How long had you been working on the company, and how much had been invested in the company to date?

Dundas: YouAreTV as a site launched in January of 2006. Not much more than server costs, small marketing costs and the developers’ time had been invested. We really took no angel or VC funding.

NewTeeVee: Was this a full-time project, and if so, for how many people?

Dundas: This was a full-time project for myself and one of my partners.

NewTeeVee: What will you do after you are done with YouAreTV?

Dundas: YouAre Media is the company we started after YouAreTV. In 2007, we built custom social media applications for a few companies.

We’ve developed a deep understanding of social media, building social networks, how users use social networks, and owners of social networks’ major challenges with monetization. From MySpace, which sees 80 cent [per] CPM, to Facebook developers, who see only 3 cents [a] click.

We are currently building a platform that enables niche, midsize social networks [to] monetize their audiences.

NewTeeVee: I see you haven’t received any bids yet — do you have any alternate plans for recouping what you’ve put into the site?

Dundas: We have spoken with a number of people interested in the site. We have received offers in private (from writers at major tech blogs, interestingly enough…). We’re pretty confident that we’ll at the very least meet our asking price. The reason why we’re doing it via eBay is to let the market determine the site’s worth with the least friction, rather than hiring a broker [and] dealing with all of the headaches of an acquisition. We’re saying, “Here’s what we’ve built, there’s value there — we’ll let you decide how much.”