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.
Elliot Silver
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.
christian
I think that Comcast probably meant the purchase price was minimal in relation to other investments. I mean the highest recorded domain sales are between 10 and 12 million depending on who you talk to that is a drop in the bucket for billion dollar corporations.
Andrew Reberry
near top of all time? I would expect this to be a $20 million + sale. I know – sounds crazy. But the domain alone + traffic, and buying it from a large company. What does Disney care about say $3 million?
Joe Davison
It would be interesting to probe this a bit more to find out more details of the deal.
Charley
How much do you think that site would have sold for considering 1.9 MILLION UNIQUES per month ? Just a rough figure ?
**Jamie Says**
I would think in the 15-25 Million range. That would be my guess.
John Bomhardt
Apparently killer domains must not be that insurmountable to acquire. Maybe we should never assume that we’d have to buy Bank of America to get the domain LOANS.COM
Why not ask them?
Fandango pulled off a quick one under our noses.
Nice…
John
http://unplain.com
GenericGene
I would be surprised if it was anything less than $10M
robb
I think it was a stupid sale by Disney. Selling the .com domain of one of your main products, ‘movies’, doesn’t make sense. I think they’ll regret it one day – it’s a short sighted move.