As it was reported this morning, Movies.com was purchased from Disney by Fandango which is owned by Comcast. I was reading the story on Yahoo! and was pretty shocked to read Comcast say the "purchase price was minimal" for Movies.com . WHAT??? Maybe their "minimal" is WAY different then my thinking…
The story also stated "Fandango said it had 6.3 million monthly unique visitors to its Web site in May compared with 1.9 million for Movies.com."
Any domain that is getting 1.9 MILLION UNIQUES per month is going to cost a pretty penny! I know Comcast has a boat load of money, but I’m sure this domain sale could very well rank near the top of all time domain sales IMO.
Since the selling price was not disclosed, I can not say Disney got the bad end of the deal, but to hear Comcast say the purchase price was minimal, Disney (The Movie Maker) got the short end of the deal. Why list your "movies" under http://home.disney.go.com/movies/ ? Disney already uses Go.com for it’s main site and uses subdomains for all of it’s linking from what I can see, so maybe that’s why they sold?
Also to note: The Montley Fool reports that Fandango did not migrate Movies.com current members into Fandango’s interface, so all Movies.com users will need to sign up with Fandango.
Not that I am that knowledgeable about SEC regulations, but it may be an attempt to not have to publish the price in the form of a 10k (http://www.sec.gov/answers/form10k.htm). If the price won’t impact their financials, it could be considered “minimal” allowing them to keep the price private.
**Jamie Says**
Good point Elliot! I’m sure their goal is to keep the sale price private.
June 23rd, 2008