December 14th, 2007
With the election less than a year away, we are inundated with everything we can possibly need to know about each of the possibly presidential candidates. Whether it’s their past history, drug use, their stand on the war or anything else you can possibly think of, but there’s one top that doesn’t come up too often. How rich are these presidential hopeful’s really worth? Money Magazine recently did an article on the top candidates and how much richer than us they really are, and where they’re keeping their stash! From Mitt Romney’s $200+ Million net worth, all the way down to Obama’s $1.3 Million… we got ya covered!
I remember during the last election I saw something pretty crazy! The Republican party had an Affiliate Program running on CommissionJunction, which was paying 30% commissions on all party donations. What this meant was, anyone referred from an affiliate site, and donated say $100…$30 (30%) of that actually would have went to the "affiliate site", then another transaction percentage to CJ for handling the transaction. What I’m getting at is that a good portion of your donations were actually going elsewhere too! I’ll be interested to see if this happens again this year. I think it’s quite shady to take commissions from any donations, even if they are political… but imagine what type of earnings you could see if you ran a political site with loyal candidate followers!
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December 14th, 2007
AdultFriendFinder, the super popular “risqué” dating network has been purchased by adult entertainment company Penthouse Media Group Inc for $500 million in cash and securities. The deal to purchase Various Inc, includes more than 25 online communities, which has a combined member base of over 260 million people. AdultFriendFinder along as more than 18 million members.
Why does this matter so much? FriendFinder and AdultFriendFinder are one of the largest dating
Affiliate Programs around and have been around a very long time. With the buyout from Penthouse Media Group Inc, this only brings more stability and money to the company. The growth and success of this company never would have happened without their massive affiliate network in place.
FriendFinder boasts on their affiliate sites, “With over 150 million registered members in the network, it remains the #1 top-paying dating affiliate program 10 years in a row!”. Besides the fact that they are the number one paying company, being able to boast that you’ve had an affiliate program for 10 years is something to be proud of. I personally have never run AdultFriendFinder, but have placed a few banners here and their for their general audience dating networks. Unlike other dating networks that pay per free signup, FriendFinder pays their affiliates in three different options, which you can choose.
I know a lot of people have made a lot of money through FriendFinder programs, and their affiliate admin area has an amazing amount of different banners and creatives to promote on your sites, they even have flash video banners and geo-targeting banners which I hear work amazing.
If you haven’t already, I recommend at least taking a look at their affiliate program and joining.
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September 21st, 2007
I last talked about HandHeld Entertainment when they announced that they were acquiring eBaumsWorld.com for $17.5 million. I also went into great detail on all the other site acquisitions they had over the past year and how their plummeting stock was a disaster!
In addition to keeping an eye on this stock and knowing pretty much all of the sites they have scooped up, I’ve also been holding stock in this company for a long time now. I first purchased right after they picked up Dorks.com back in November 2006… and have been buying on the dips, all the way down to $1.50! (52wk Range: 1.00 - 7.78)
Today I was looking over my portfolio and saw my numbers were up pretty high. I noticed ZVUE (HandHeld Entertainment’s Stock Symbol) was up over +50%! For the first time, comScore is now measuring all of HandHeld’s Web sites as a single entity. This is a big change over and mainly because of HandHeld’s formal launch of ZVUE Networks, its online video advertising network. With the new ranking in place, HHE was ranked #1, at the top of the ‘Top 10 Gaining Properties by Percentage Change in Unique Visitors” for August 2007. HandHeld had the largest increase in unique visitors (U.S.) by 327% month-over-month from July 2007 to August 2007.
In addition to the big spike on news today, ZVUE also made news saying they will buy back over a million shares of their own stock over the next 6 months. With all the news on this stock and a company buyback in place, is it now time to buy into ZVUE? Time will tell, and I’m sure they will have more business acquisitions on the way.
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August 3rd, 2007
HandHeld Entertainment has acquired eBaumsWorld.com for $17.5 million! eBaumsworld.com is one known as being on of the first and largest entertainment sites online. At it’s prime the entertainment site ranked within the Top 500 sites, based on Alexa ranking. Due to mass competition in the video and entertainment space, eBaumsworld.com has lost a lot of it’s traffic due to new 2.0 sites like break.com, metacafe.com and youtube. Below is an Alexa traffic chart for ebaumsworld.com over the past few years.
EbaumsWorld.com’s page views have steadily decreased as more 2.0 sites go live.
According to Wikipedia, ebaumsworld.com is: eBaum’s World (subtitled "Media for the masses") is a popular website based in Rochester, New York featuring media such as videos, Flash cartoons and web games. It is highly controversial for many reasons, primarily due to the fact that content on the website is taken from other sources without permission and rebranded with the eBaum’s World logo. The site, which is owned by Eric "eBaum" Bauman, a native of Rochester, New York, ranks in the top 2000 sites on the Internet according to the website Alexa. It is co-owned by Eric’s secretary and father, Neil Bauman.
The purchase of eBaumsWorld.com is just one of many from Handheld Entertainment. Let’s take a look at some of their previous acquisitions:
November 14, 2006
- HandHeld Entertainment Acquires Dorks.com, a Fast-Growing Web Site Full of Hilarious Videos Attracting Up To 1 Million Unique Visitors per Month. $1.5 Million.
December 1, 2006
- HandHeld Entertainment Increases Position in the User-Generated Humorous Videos Marketplace by Acquiring FunMansion.com for $1.1 Million
December 18, 2006
- HandHeld Entertainment Acquires YourDailyMedia.com for $1.06 Million; HandHeld’s Network of Web Sites Now Attracts as Many as 5 Million Unique Visitors Per Month
February 6, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment Acquires Putfile.com and Increases Audience to More Than 13.7 Million Unique Visitors and 83 Million Page Views. $7.1 Million
March 27, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment Expands European Presence with Acquisition of UnOriginal.co.uk. $500,000
April 24, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment Continues to Expand its European Presence with the Acquisition of Holylemon.com. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
August 2, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment to Acquire eBaum’s World, a Premier Online Entertainment Site. $17.5 Million
As you can see from Handheld Entertainment’s acquisitions, they are quite serious… buying up almost all sites that rank on the first page of Google for "funny videos". Now let’s take a look at Handheld Entertainment’s stock situation. (Symbol: ZVUE).
The chart below represents ZVUE stock over the past year. The huge jump in the stock price during November was a direct result of the news of their first purchase of Dorks.com… since then the stock has been absolutely horrendous. I was unlucky enough to jump in and follow this stock at the time of it’s rocketing from $1 to $7 per share… and now almost back to where it originally started. I have been buying on the dips, which seem to be continuous. However, with their recent purchases, they are always a possible buyout target and have a very powerful network of entertainment sites at the moment. What is even more interesting is that nearly all of Handheld Entertainment’s acquisitions were a cash and stock bundle package. With such fluctuations in their stock price, these multi-million dollar deals have potentially changed from being worth millions to much smaller figure deals in the long run. (Vice versa if we should see this stock rocket once again.)
Is ZVUE now a deal at these super low prices, or still a crappy stock with no legs?
HandHeld Entertainment’s network of Web sites (eBaumsWorld.com™, Putfile.com™, Holylemon.com™, UnOriginal.co.uk™, YourDailyMedia.com™, Dorks.com™, FunMansion.com™ and ZVUE.com™) now houses more than 850,000 user-generated and commercial videos available for purchase or free viewing, as well as millions of free user-submitted photos and other media, and is expected to deliver nearly one billion page views/video streams in 2007. Keep an eye on ZVUE stock and all future mergers on this company, as they may soon become a big player or potential take over target.
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July 27th, 2007
Well… it didn’t take long and I’m not too surprised, but Jeremy Shoemoney’s AuctionAds network was just acquired by MediaWhiz. The purchase price was not disclosed, but speculation from some sites and forums put the deal in the $5-$10 million range.(pure speculation) I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was more. Some current numbers on AuctionAds’ network are around: 25,000 affiliates, 300M impressions a day, $1 Million a month in revenue. Ebay probably could have saved themselves a nice amount of cash if they picked up the network, while MediaWhiz made the most of an excellent opportunity. Full Shoemoney and TechCrunch article here.
Earlier this month I reported how I earned over $1,500 last month with AuctionAds. This month so far has been another story and the tracking looks like a mess. My daily click and earnings numbers for this month are all over the place. With such sporadic numbers in place it makes it very hard to see what type of traffic is producing what revenue. I can only hope MediaWhiz will rapidly put their money and tech management to work as soon as possible to correct these tracking problems and sporadic downtime soon. Congrats to Shoe and AuctionAds group on this fast and successful startup/sale!
Last month I did well with AuctionAds, but this month numbers are on the low end
Will affiliates of AuctionAds continue to see the same earnings… or better/worse?
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"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.