Jon

It's only been about 4-5 months since AuctionAds hit the scene and immediately went from beta to unreal. To date, if my research proves correct, they've signed up something like 25,000 affiliates, churning out 300M impressions a day, bringing in over $1M a month in revenue, across over 80,000 sites. Damn. That's a lot by anyone's standards.

So here's the news I have, and I can almost bet Shoemoney will be pissed that I'm reporting on it too, but I just can't help myself, because even though it's technically still a rumor, it's one of those rumors that will be proven to be true in 30 days or less.

AuctionAds has been rumored to be selling, but from what I found out, they are selling it for between $5M-$7M (which if this is the real selling price, the new owner will be getting it for a giant bargain compared to how other places like Google value companies they buy).

The list of potential buyers are:
eBay (duh)
Yahoo
MediaWhiz
Chitika
Shopping.com (even though owned by eBay are acting on its own)

Here's what I know for sure...

- Bids have been made by all "potential" buyers so far.
- Shoemoney and his crew have had some serious downtime and this project has definitely gotten out of hand in the sense that it's grown too quickly and too large for them to even handle anymore. Selling it now would be a quick and easy exit strategy so that someone with more experience and power could take it over and do serious earning damage (in a good way) with it.
- The price range is very realistic at the moment, but if they wait maybe 2-3 more months, they could get between $15M-$25M for it. If it were me, and the deal were lagging (which I think it has been) then I'd get out, and sell it in a year from now for a hell of a lot more, but that's just the greed in my talking.
- The sale will close before September 1st IF it does sell and if they don't pull out and follow my advice (you guys better read this).

So there ya have it. Another WickedFire exclusive. Shoemoney, I know you're going to email me bitching about why I did this without asking you first, but dude, the source is pretty damn good, and you'd report on it if you were in my shoes. Bwahaha!!

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Drake

Ya if they have that many offers this is gold. They should show a bank those offers and ask for a loan or some venture capital money to expand.

Hire some programmers, marketing, and email communication people and build it up more. Any money spent would be well worth it and they dont even need to spend their own money. Outside people might bring better ideas for packaging and communicating with outside companies, and better lawyers...

Or is this Jons latest linkbait?

Jon

When it is made public, I want an apology from you Drake for using the LB crap.

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wesley

No need for him to apologize jon, it's your own fault that people doubt everything you say since you pulled the LB card so many times.

Anyway, great news for shoemoney

Jon

Only a few times cocksucker.. and admitted to it each time pretty quickly, doh!

But this isn't about me.. it's about AA. I still think they should wait. But if I were the buyer, now is definitely a good time to buy it for under 10 months of revenue.

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productionhead

so is $1m a month auctionad's cuts or is that the total amount the users are generating?

if so auctionads itself is not profiting, the affiliates and ebay are so it might seem more of something ebay would pick up to include into their own program, who knows.

shopping.com now if they can buy this 25k+ affiliates and 300m imp/day would be huge for them and definitly profitable in the long run

krazyjosh5

I dont understand why ebay would want to buy it? Wouldnt it be cheaper for them to just allow the affiliate program to run and generate more business for them?

If they do buy it and end up just absorbing it into their current system (or even relaunching their affiliate system, maybe), that might open the way for a copycat AuctionAds to fill its place.

bgmacaw

As long as it's not Chitika. They would probably screw it up and do stuff like kick everyone who doesn't have a single site with a million hits a day out of the program.

Xrproto

Not shocking that it's being sold, I thought that was his intentions from the get go. I could swear he mentioned something of the sort way before it was out of beta.

Good news Jon and I agree...hold out at least a year.

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Xrproto

Here in his predictions for '07 ww w.shoemoney.com/2007/01/06/my-official-predictions-for-2007/

"7) eBay after 4 years (well it seems like 4) of trying to develop there own auction based ad network will buy an existing one for a zillion dollars *cough* shoemoneyads *cough* DISCLOSURE NOTICE: I OWN SHOEMONEYADS"

That was before they split it and started AA.

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LazyHippy

Shame AuctionAds has stopped fuckin working.... hopefully it will be better in more reliable hands.

Hope Google buys it just to piss eBay off!

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gage

From Dillsmack: Jon, you are a moron.

lucab

o i c

EasyClickTravel

Yep, you can see this one coming a mile away.

nachoninja

I highly doubt they are making that much $$$ a month

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Aequitas

If shoe wasen't lying then he isn't making anything from it yet, he said the creators won't make a penny for 6 months from AuctionAds, 100% of the affiliate income will go to the affiliates, he said but after 6 months they will start to earn.

Now he could have planned this from the start and it would have been very smart, the above message was more of a sales ploy then anything, he just needed to get people to join, and let it build its-self up for at least 6 months, after which he could easily flip it for a couple million, easy cash.

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krazyjosh5

So the deal is that AuctionAds pays out 100% of commission revenue for the first tier and then they keep the difference once they get enough traffic and get bumped up to higher tier payouts (55%, 60%, 65%, 70%, etc)?

Or that they just payout 100% for 6, 7, X months to get users built up and then start skimming (paying out 95%, 90%, etc)?

nachoninja

The phrase "fake it 'til you make it" applies here

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COPEAC =

Aequitas

I'm not 100% sure how shoe and his team set this part up but I know that they said they would not earn any money from this for the first 6 months, all cash earned in the first 6 month's will be paid out to the affiliates, so 100% goes to affiliate for the first 6 months.

From there I never heard how he was going to start making money from it, I assume he was just going to take a 5%, maybe 10% cut off the top of the 1 Million per month, which means that instead of the affiliates getting 100% only 90% would be distributed among the affiliates and the other percentage would be for shoe and his team.

However the 6 months are not quite up yet and I haven't heard anything else about him taking a cut from this, so this is why I assume he had it kind of planned from the start, offer affiliates 100% profits for 6 months to grow the network super quickly and then flip it to a larger organization for a couple Mil.

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natekapi

Isn't AuctionAds partially funded or partially owned by the company behind Text Link Ads?

Why wouldn't they just buy it or give them some more cash for more servers?

I'm not accusing, but I'm wondering if this could just be linkbait?

Drake