How much does an old Web 1.0 startup go for these days? Well, here’s an indication. Pub listings guide BeerintheEvening.com – running since the late 90s – was for £30,000, confirms Chris Hughes of new owner Neransk, a UK-based communities operator. The sale actually happened about a year ago but Neransk only just got back to me with the confirmation. Would it have been better to use the cash to build a better Web 2.0 site? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
by
Mike Butcher
on
August 28, 2008
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20 comments
Without knowing how much revenue the site generates it’s hard to say, but the domain is 7 years old and has quite a good Google page rank, so it probably gets quite a bit of traffic and is probably well indexed.
A pub listings guide running since the late 90s must be big enough to be HUGE Directory.
The new owner has rights to the existing content. He can upgrade at his will, as and when he wants to.
I’m surprised, it strikes me as quite a low-ball figure. The site’s well regarded among the publican user-base with a number stumping up for the premium listing option, which gave me the impression that revenues were respectable.
I suspect that the 30k headline figure is concealing some more interesting financial details – either the company had a lot of debt when it was sold (not impossible for an ‘old’ company with a decent revenue stream) or there’s an earn-out structure for the previous owners who may still be running the day-to-day operations.
Ultimately, the value is in the user-base, and if the technology was good enough for the users then why upgrade? Don’t forget, the users are people who are looking for Ye Olde Pub that serves Ye Olde-style Beer and I think there’s very much a ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ attitude in that community.
The site seems to have built up a good search engine ranking so I imagine it gets a lot of natural search traffic, I know I have ended up on the site numerous times.
In the past I have found a lot of the information on there old and out of date so if they could redesign it and bring it into the web 2.0 era without loosing the search engine listings and perhaps make it a little more user friendly it could become a decent site.
When daylight breaks, Ill be down that road. Rockman an me, with a lighter load. We’ll stop for lunch, in some taco bar. Lee marvin on the jukebox, wanderin star.
Maybe there’s hope for me selling siliconglen.com yet….
I mailed them about a sale a couple of years back and they weren’t interested (and would have paid more than 30k even back then) so I guess that shows they failed to get full market price. They could have cleared 100k pretty easily if they’d marketed the sale correctly.
PS. what is web 1.0 about a user generated site? Lets get over the whole web 1 or 2 garbage. If a site has users it has users, 9.9/10 couldn’t care less about what the tech elite think.
@K:F
Still standing by the JAMs.
I know it’s not particualrly 2.0 in look and feel but surely the user generated reviews aspect is more important.
I woulda thought the whole ugc angle made it quite 2.0, and the fact it has a community I would have thought marks it out over quite a few start ups.
Eurgh hate my use of 2.0 in the comment above but it kind of communicates my point of view.
Seems a bit of a bargain at £30k.
They say they have 40,000 venues listed and have over 1.3 million unique visitors a month.
With a name that is know by many and strong search engine and other links, it looks pretty good value to me.
I think that figure is very cheap, considering they say they get 1.3million uniques every month and as previously mentioned there are a lot of pubs signed up to premium services at £100/year.
In agreement with earlier comments, I don’t what you really mean by Web 2.0 – My impression was that web 2.0 is where its a community and not just a static site, through the use of blogs, forums, comments, user-generated content etc… I think the site does that, even if it never updates its ‘new’ blog, or the new features they seem to go on about never materialise
I agree with Andrew, less snippy web 1.0 chat please. It’s a good site that meets needs well, not everthing needs to have no vowels in the title and rounded corners
I’m not being snippy about Web 1.0 (I was there too) – I’m just interested in whether a web 2.0 makeover would have made a difference.
A reasonable price in my view. A lot of traffic, a large user base, recurring revenue and nearly 40,000 incoming links .. I think the buyer got a good deal.
Insanely cheap, I would have paid double…
I suspect the price reflected how much the site was making at the time. I feel that £30k is good value and that at the point of sale it was under-monetised.
It gets nearly 30k uniques per day. It’s got around 440,000 indexed pages in Google.
The majority of times I get facebooked or emailed to go out for a drinks with friends in London, a link to their website is used – it’s a valuable website to the user and its interesting to see that it appears that it has not been that well monitised.
its does seem cheap but as stated it was probably a reflection on earnings hence the PE must have been decent. They could being doing a lot more with it to monitise what they have and to make it easier/smarter for people to get to the information (web2.0 stuff)..
BITE is great, totally underpriced. Am I the only one that own’s the Beer in the Evening pub guide book? See Amazon, you can still get it.
Great SEO, more traffic than bigger funded businesses like trustedplaces, toptable, moveme, touchlocal according to Alexa; web2 community before it’s time in some ways.
I don’t think a makeover would have made it much more valuable (underlying traffic / $) – might have allowed them to flip it for more though.
£30k!! That’s madness! Unless there’s a revenue share with the old owner etc but even then it’s still vastly undervalued. The minimum monthly revenue a site with that sort of traffic should be making from ads and affiliate revenues is £7-8K, and that’s without trying. With a bit of effort it should be doing £250k. With a good sales person doing things like “Evening pub of the year” awards etc it should be raking in £500k a year.
marcus
Glad to see the new owner has pushed things forward.
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=beerintheevening.com%2C+qype.co.uk&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Oh, wait….
Some interesting comments.
Personally, we are going through all the data still and making sure it’s valid, whilst catching up on the backlog of everything. As regards to web2.0 – there is no need to make everything all AJAX’d up and mashed in with everything if the data isn’t any good / the current submissions, etc aren’t included.
We’re also working on the corporate side (working with the chains and breweries) to see what they want and other various features for our end users.
With regards to our traffic v qype.co.uk, etc – our marketing spend every month is £0.00 – what is theirs?
The figures for traffic are correct and last time we looked, we were miles ahead with Hitwise in regards to market share for our category. Remember we only cover pubs and bars not everything under the sun (ie. hairdressers and shoe repairs!)
Chris
ps. As much as qype, etc seem to be doing well – there isn’t one of those companies (welovelocal, trustedplaces, etc) that we haven’t a) caught spamming our users and/or b) desperate to partner with us ..
Type the name of any pub into Google; see what site comes up usually first or occasionally second; then tell me the site’s not worth 10x the £30k it went for. BITE is the third page of search for a pub industry that’s worth billions.
Marcus – How would you make 7-8k per month, what ad network would you use for that or would you have to sell ads yourself to get that figure? and how would it reach 250k per month on ads on those numbers? or did this figure include the revenue from pubs listing on the website
Chris – how do you speak to the large chains, letter, phone or email – I thought they would not have the time to speak with you?
“We’re also working on the corporate side (working with the chains and breweries) to see what they want and other various features for our end users.”
What features would the chains want that you dont offer, as the site is comprehensive as it is
I agree with Doug Monro. I really like BITE. Simple, effective and a great real ale community. I use the site all the time. Qype is also good and has a cooler crowd but i use it more for meeting people + things to do at the weekend.
I think the market has passed them by and there are much better pub sites around even if they havn’t yet got the same volume of traffic . Good example is itsourlocal.com which if it takes off could be the facebook for pubs.
Jon, I took a look at ItsOurLocal.com and I can see what you mean. Its all for free and 1000% better than beerintheevenning. Looks like pubs can build their own web pages which look really pro. Google knows about 250K link on the site too. I think its one to watch. Mike
A reasonable price in my view. A lot of traffic, a large user base, recurring revenue and nearly 40,000 incoming links .. I think the buyer got a good deal.