TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

What Happened to Movie-Vault?

I’ve been getting a fair number of inquiries as to what happened to my site Movie-Vault.com, and so I thought I’d make this thread to help rest any rumors or confusion.

Back in November, I had mentioned how I had sold Movie-Vault.com for $50,000. That was part of the problem; I learned a valuable lesson. In the future, don’t proclaim something as sold until you have the money in your hands.

Well, the sale didn’t end up going through as the buyers backed out at the last moment. Who was the buyer? Jon from WickedFire (God, I hate how he doesn’t post his last name and is thus known as Jon from WickedFire, like an old English title… Robin from Burkinshire, heh… giving him free advertising :P).

I don’t blame Jon and his partner for backing out at the last minute – they didn’t exactly back out, they just offered a lower price, but it should be noted I was never hiding anything about the traffic or anything. On the contrary, I was always completely up front stating that Urchin stats were highly inflated with search bots. The confusion came in with just how inflated (guesstimate is real traffic is around 20% of Urchin stats).

More information as to why the sale fell through can be found on WickedFire.

Even ShoeMoney seemed to be interested in purchasing my site, as he wrote on a blog post of his. He makes some good points:

Movie-Vault.com – TylerCruz is selling his “baby” in this thread at digitalpoint. Geez I want this site. Why? 1) It has amazing original content (over 2150 movie reviews). 2) its seo’d like crap. Same meta tags on virtually every page within the site. 3) Tons of room for improvement in monetization.

Why Dont I like it – Well its in perl and uses some wild perl module. If I were to buy it I would move it all to php and geez that could end up being a ton of work. Also I think its going to take much more time to maintain then I have available which means I would have to hire people to do it… which I dont want to do.

Anyway the auction is 40k starting bid 60k buy it now for the site. Some people make some good points in the thread which he is not contesting.

At first glance I didn’t understand number 2, but then it came to me. It’s actually good that it’s SEO’ed like crap because it means that it’s not living up to it’s SE potential, and that the new owner can clean it up and take advantage that it’s never been SEO’ed properly.

Anyhow, Jon… from Wickedfire… backed out, and so I went on to continue with whatever it is I do. Then, about a month ago, I was contacted over the phone. The conversation went something along the lines of:

Woman: Hello, may I please speak to Tyler Cruz?
Me: Yup, speaking.
Woman: Hi, my name is ____ ____ and I’m with XYZ company.
Woman: Please hold on while I connect you to the CEO of XYZ company.
Me: Okay…
Man: Hi, Tyler?
Me: Hi…
Man: Hi, I noticed that you are selling Movie-Vault…

After a conversation of around an hour, it ended with them being extremely interested in the site and basically making me an offer over the phone for $50,000 for Movie-Vault.com or $55,000 for Movie-Vault.com and MovieForums.org.

I asked to think about it overnight, and when I tried contacting them back on a couple of occasions, both through e-mail and by phone, I received no response to my e-mails or voicemails. *Shrug* Oh well, they can’t have been as interested as I thought then… or else they’re having some big communication problem.

I’m in no hurry to sell Movie Vault, but I am definitely more open to selling it now. I have less emotion involved into the site as I used to, and it’s not making a whole ton of money. On the flip side, $50,000 is really not a lot of money, not when you consider the sheer size and presence of Movie-Vault.

So, I may put it up for sale again and see what happens. But, to set the record straight, it’s still mine and hasn’t been sold to anyone.