eBaumsWorld.com Acquired for $17.5 million!

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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Action Alerts Plus

Time for another Jim Cramer Action Alerts update. It’s been a couple weeks since my last post, but the portfolio performance just keeps going up. The initial investment of $300 to join the program was well worth it. Since joining I have bought and sold every time I received one of Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts emails, saying to do so. My portfolio is now worth $62,141.35 and up an amazing $4,894.60 (8.55%). I always like to buy some stocks on my own (which I track in separate portfolios), but Jim Cramer’s picks are almost always winners…. I’m not always so lucky with my own picks It’s been just under nine months since joining Action Alerts Plus and its now up almost $5k! Every post I have made so far has been showing solid gains and I’m not gaining any compensation from these, nor on referrals (I wish he did have an Affiliate Program, I praise him so much!)… but if you are looking to start investing, Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts are the way to go!

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Merger Mania

Lately, every day there has been some speculation and or news on a new online marketing firm being picked up for millions… or even BILLIONS of dollars. Now that Microsoft has just picked up aQuantive for $6 Billion, we have seen the BIG 3 all take on new ad companies in their heavy competition to take each other out. We even had some exciting rumors on Microsoft finally deciding to buy Yahoo, but this ended up not happening. Yahoo then went on to buy RightMedia for $680 million. Microsoft also was very interested in 24/7 Media, but then WPP Group (the world’s No. 2 advertising firm) went on to purchase 24/7 Media for $649 million! When Google had originally purchased DoubleClick for an amazing $3.1 billion, some said it was way overpriced and Google was insane. Now that Microsoft has purchased aQuantive for an even more insane $6 Billion… people are now saying Google got DoubleClick as a steal and Microsoft bought aQuantive through panicking.

Here’s a quick review of what’s been going on lately…

Here’s a quick list of the lonely ad firms that have yet to be picked up… with ValueClick being the main target of speculation on being picked up next. Many felt ValueClick was next to be picked up and that Microsoft would have been the company to do it. In comparison between aQuantive and ValueClick, their 2006 reveue numbers are nearly the same. (ValueClick 2006 Revenue: $545.6 M /Income: $62.6 M - aQuantive 2006 Revenue: $442.2 M / Income: $54.0 Million). Based on their numbers and the buyout craze, ValueClick could be valued for $6 BILLION+. While ValueClick is the only public company below, the other two are still industry leaders in advertising.

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Make Money with Jim Cramer Update

I’ve had a few requests to make an update to my "Make Money with Mad Money’s Jim Cramer" post I made last month. Since the last post Jim has recommended a decent amount of new buys, and only one sell. The original post I made was on April 23, 2007… which was less than a month ago. At that time the portfolio was up $1880.25, which was +7.64% at the time… over the past month the portfolio has nearly doubled in size because of all the new positions, and is currently up +$5.90% and $2,865.95. This means the over the past 26 days, the portfolio gained nearly $1,000 in new money. (the percentage amount up went down because the portfolio size has increased so much with new positions)

In conclusion, same old with Jim Cramer.. do what he says and you will make money. He even says he has full faith in the market going to 14,000! I’ll keep you updated on the portfolio and it’s continuing upward trend!

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Microsoft Buys Yahoo

Well, at least that is what the possibilities are… In early morning reports, Microsoft rocks the market and business industry news that it is now in talks with Yahoo again on a possible buyout / merger. Microsoft and Yahoo are two of my biggest stock positions. Yahoo stock is already up over 16% today on the news. I would love to see something happen between these two companies and what they can do to complete against the 800lb Google! As reported by New York Post, "While Microsoft and Yahoo! have held informal deal talks over the years, sources say the latest approach signals an urgency on Microsoft’s part that has up until now been lacking. The new approach follows an offer Microsoft made to acquire Yahoo! a few months ago, sources said. But Yahoo! spurned the advances of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Wall Street sources put a roughly $50 billion price tag on Yahoo!".

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