Internet Brands Offer

Received and rejected Internet Brands' offer of US$400k - $500k for my site. I emailed them back with a minimum counter offer acceptance price of US$750,000. They would reply two days later with their response.

To put their offer in perspective, I had already turned down a higher offer of US$750,000 - which Internet Brands new about - and yet Internet Brands had more capital from which to offer! (Around US$40 million cash on hand as of the previous balance date).

In addition, the site generated US$80,000 in earnings in the first four months of 2009, and made its best ever month in February of 2009, earning over NZ$40,000 profit (US$20,000+ at the time). More importantly however was the sites dominant position in Google for its search terms, claiming #1 spot for many of the pages on the site. These helped drive revenue for the site and were responsible for 60% or more of the sites traffic.

The lucrativeness of the forex industry is perhaps best displayed in the following post where one trader earned me up to US$2,000 in one day's trading: Read Post

The site made around US$150,000 in profit before tax and any salary for the previous 12 months (it only took around 30 minutes per day to run in any case), and their offer represented around 2.6 - 3.2 times gross profit, despite their own company trading at around 32 times net profit at the time. Fixed expenses amounted to around US$250 per month. In addition, I was told at the outset that my website would be a "keynote addition" to their growing portfolio of communities.

And despite being told in the first phone call that they are "fast" and "fair", the acquisition process took far longer than originally anticipated and their offer was far below what I considered to be "fair", given its position in the global forex industry. Indeed, my own original valuation I set at US$1 million. This would later prove interesting in light of their last email in the negotiation phase, and what happened on January 13, 2011.