The site's for sale (SOLD!)

I have put this site up for sale on eBay! It's kind of crazy, but any longtime readers have probably noticed I've been only posting rarely here for the past year or two, nothing like the good old days. I've become increasingly busy running other blogs and a family and realized instead of pulling the plug, I might as well hand it off to another up-and-coming technology blogger, hence the no reserve eBay listing.

UPDATE: The site sold through eBay for $12,110 on December 18, 2009 to a web firm in Austin called BrightFire. Their plans call for continuing PVR-related news and content on the site and the transition will take place sometime in January.

Comments

[Mark Mangano]

Matt,

Thanks for all of your work on this site for the past 6+ years. This was one of the first technology sites that I visited every day!

Best wishes,

Mark

[Paul Stamatiou]

I hope you get a great price Matt. I would also suggest posting information about the eBay listing on Sitepoint.com's marketplace - lots of web guys with an eye for monetization frequent that part of the Internet. I sold 300 lines of code and a 2 month old domain name to some guy on that site for $3k a while ago!

That being said I'm shocked you made so little with a great blog like this! I would value PVRblog at over $40k. And I'd suggest the next owner take a good look at working with affiliate programs for relevant PVR/HT/TV products. My blog is a slightly different niche but I have been doing well with just a few key affiliate programs. But I digress.. good luck with the sale!

[suvi]

wow, this is cool. I didn't expect that such a specialized blog will get this high bids. What was the starting offer?

[steve]

I just placed a couple of bids on ebay for the site, but it appears the auction is being sniped pretty hard. I'd take good care of it, but sadly I can't compete with a bot.

[Matt Haughey]

$0.99

[Brad Templeton]

A pagerank of 9 was indeed astounding. I have an 8, and I get online casinos offering me as much as $18,000 per year for just a link from such pages. Of course there is the risk that Google then sees it, and downgrades your rank.

The high number of readers seems very attractive, but of course if somebody buys that and starts blogging about something other than PVRs, one would expect those to evaporate. Might be better to instead have sponsored recommendations -- "Hey all you readers, here's a blog to check out."

You have enough traffic and PR for spammers to bid. The question is whether you'll get a high bidder who wants to keep blogging about pvrs or something related.

[Fred Miller]

Good luck with everything. I've really enjoyed reading your blog. I hope whoever buys it does as good a job as you did.

[Nickfruhling]

More well wishes here, thanks for the years of work, much appreciated.

[Brad Templeton]

Just a warning. I am not bidding, but I noticed all your high bidders with bidders with no reputation. You do not want to allow low reputation bidders to bid on high ticket items. What they will do is place irrational bids to see if they win at a lower price. If they don't win, they just vanish and don't care about burning the reputation on the account -- just go get another one.

In the meantime they scared away real bidders so going to the 2nd highest bidder does not help you.

This does not always happen, but if it does, when you re-list, you will want to find a way to cancel bids of low rep bidders.

[Matt Haughey]

Thanks for the tips Brad. Yeah, unfortunately, I only seem to be able to block people with negative feedback or existing marks, nothing about banning zero feedback or new users from bidding.

I'm only about 50% sure at best this will result in a real bid that actually gets paid, but in the end at least I have a story of how eBay really can't be trusted for doing what it is supposed to be good at.

[Paul Stamatiou]

If that does end up being the case I'd be interested.

[Chris Guthrie]

Hey Matt,

Let me know if the winning bidder doesn't go through with the price. I sent you an email earlier but you never got back to me :(

Chris Guthrie

[Matt Haughey]

Sorry about that Chris, about 4-5 people emailed the same thing at the same time.

Things are looking pretty good and hopefully the transition will happen in the next couple weeks.

[DZ]

Couple weeks? Hmmm... If it falls through, we should talk.

[Brad Templeton]

Looks like you got a serious bidder. 10K is some nice cash to get though I have to say I would think with the number of subscribers it should get more, but the interesting question is how can a successor get the value of that number -- other than by blogging PVRs of course. Hopefully that's what they want to do.

I will encourage them as well to include more MythTV news, which is what I run. Not simply because I run it, but because Myth is where a lot of the innovation shows up and it would be good if other parts of the pvr field knew about them. (For example, I love Myth's ability to speed up video while maintaining audio pitch, and I watch a lot of shows sped up 15 to 30%.)

[Lou Jacob]

Congrats on the sale, Matt!!!
Lou Jacob
DVRupgrade

[David]

Well I'm sorry to see this blog go. Hopefully it will only be a week or two before the new owners can bring it back to life.

[Charles]

Well I stumbled across this blog whilst searching for a review new PVR's. Looking forward to the next new blog here...

[Zatz]

What's going on here? It's now March... And was hoping to see some TiVo Series4 coverage. Ah well, you know I've got it covered. :)