A Local Online Tech Community Up for Sale

When I first thought of mov­ing to Van­cou­ver, one of the piv­otal deci­sions I made was to come and make a pre­lim­i­nary vis­it and go to a sort of tech trade show, called Techvibes Mas­sive. It was put on by the web site and asso­ci­at­ed online com­mu­ni­ty of the first word in that name. As of today, Techvibes is up for sale on eBay. Accord­ing to the list­ing:

…why are we sell­ing? Our com­pa­ny orig­i­nal­ly had a diver­si­fied strat­e­gy and we’ve recent­ly moved towards a more focused one. Our web­sites include www.clubzone.com, www.techvibes.com, www.casinozone.com, www.petsmo.com, www.discovervancouver.com… but as of the 2006 we’ve decid­ed to focus our resources 100% on clubZone.com.

Techvibes’ Mas­sive Show was how I found my first job here, and even how we found the place we are now liv­ing in! (A chance con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger in the Beer Gar­den at the end of the day end­ed up with an invi­ta­tion to have a look at the con­do that he was sell­ing as he was mov­ing to Toron­to, and the rest…is Real Estate.)

Thou­sands of sites link in to Techvibes.com, help­ing the site achieve a Google page rank of 7, and great page index­ing. Alta Vista reports over 478,000 inbound links, with over 72,000 pages indexed on Google.

The site cur­rent­ly pulls in approx­i­mate­ly $5000 to $10000 per month in rev­enue from a vari­ety of sources includ­ing ban­ner ads, fea­tured list­ings, google adsense, and seo text links. In it’s prime the site pulled in over $10k per month alone just from Adsense but has dropped off in the past year from site neglect.

If some­one has the resources to build Techvibes back up, they could very eas­i­ly get the site up to in excess of $50k per month with only a few staff.

There includes a dou­ble opt-in data­base of approx­i­mate­ly 42,000 pro­filed mem­bers.

The brand name Techvibes is very strong in the Van­cou­ver, BC, Cana­da Tech­nol­o­gy com­mu­ni­ty and could eas­i­ly be lever­aged.

The cur­rent ask­ing price is $60,000 US (about $70,600 Cana­di­an).

Fol­low-up: It appears that there is some con­tro­ver­sy about this sale, with some mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty upset about the prospect of their emails and names, etc. being sold off to the high­est bid­der. The dis­cus­sion is going on, odd­ly enough, on the Techvibes site itself.

One more Fol­low-up: Appar­ent­ly the list­ing has been removed from eBay because:

Geesh, well who­ev­er com­plained to eBay — it worked. They removed the list­ing say­ing that it was ille­gal to sell a data­base of per­son­al infor­ma­tion.

I was actu­al­ly plan­ning on remov­ing the eBay list­ing this morn­ing any­ways because we’ve had so much inter­est and most of the inquiries require a fair amount of due dili­gence… so I don’t think an eBay auc­tion would work unless we were able to pro­vide a lot more infor­ma­tion (finan­cials, access to ana­lyt­ics etc.) to the gen­er­al pub­lic.

( ‑Mike Schwarz, cur­rent Pres­i­dent of Techvibes)

So the site is still up for sale, but now it will be a far less pub­lic trans­ac­tion.