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.
Sell the condo and buy it yourself! I’ll help you write a business plan (not that I think you need any writing help whatsoever).
Looks like I was too slow to jump on it. I heard that it is now going for somewhere around 5 times that initial figure. Too rich for my blood..
BTW, thanks for the writing complement, and nice to meet you the other day.