Business Created
October, 2009 - (14 years old)
Listing Number
Listing Price
Monthly Revenue
Monthly Net Profit
Cashflow Volatility
Cash Yield
A digital media asset of this high caliber is a rare find on the market. This website is extremely popular and profitable - a unique opportunity that is best viewed in split mode.
From the frontend, the consumer perspective, the website is a market leading Brazilian platform that offers a trustworthy source of information for everything tech/mobile phone related from news, reviews and video content to phone, specs, offers and price comparison across thousands of devices. It commands a strong reputation and religious-like following with 8 million monthly readers and hundreds of thousands social media followers.
On the backend, by integrating the eCommerce component through automated affiliates linking with superior and trustworthy editorial content, the site is transforming the consumer to merchant journey, creating a new storefront for retailers and driving qualified consumers to purchase. The site is literally the frictionless tunnel a consumer takes from the initial search to the final purchase form one of the affiliated retailers.
General Highlights
Strong brand and immense social media following based on consumer trust (1.6M+ total followers)
8 million unique monthly readers - 12 million clicks per year (70M visitors in 2022 so far)
Automated revenue generation through only several affiliate partners (800k+ in profit for 2022 and undercapitalized)
Full team of 20+ in place to support continued fully streamlined remote ownership (less than 4 hours a week in owner responsibilities - current owner manages from Italy!)
The business drives over 360,000 high value purchases in Brazil, representing an estimated $62,820,000 in affiliate sales/year
Niche
The website is a Brazilian leading platform which helps consumers with tech and electronics purchase decisions. The website offers electronics news about the mobile world, cell phones with videos, photos, reviews as well as the best prices on the internet. It is the most complete mobile telephony portal in Brazil and offers rich content to the user. From daily news updates about everything that happens in the Mobile Universe to an extensive database, where readers can find more than 1800 phones registered with complete technical specs and comments from readers and ability to compare devices: actual size, technical data, screen resolution, image quality and processing power. The eCommerce tool helps to thoroughly compare devices and easily find best-in-market deals and offers before going directly to the purchase page.
Customer Base
The website has 8 million unique monthly visitors averaging 30 million monthly page views with an average dwell time of 2-3 minutes. Since 2017 the site has had 425M unique visitors with over 2.3 billion pageviews, over 90% Brazilian-based. Young readership base with over 60% in the 18-34 years old category, fairly evenly split 60%/40% male/female.
Traffic is generated from organic search 78% and with the rest coming from referral/social sources as well as regular readers. The audience is made up of geeks and mobile technology lovers who like to stay informed as well as consumers who want to get to know a particular device better before making a purchase. The site features an advanced search engine to surf through the most complete tech files of 10,000 devices available in the market.
The platform serves the basic needs for a consumer to make a decision: image of product, in-depth, unbiased reviews, comparison and video demo - all released as soon as products hit the shelves. Their research shows that 73% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product if they can watch a video explaining it beforehand. And the platform offers just that: the most complete archive of video reviews of devices, informing how to get the most out of their tech.
Revenue Sources
Affiliates - amounting to approximately 52% of total or US$694,000 expected in 2022 is split among Zoom (42%), Amazon (9%) and other affiliations (1%).
Advertising - generated approximately US$357,000 in 2022 or 29% of total. Adsense is the only display advertising revenue monetized on the website ~US$284,000 in 2022 while YouTube channel is expected to generate US$73,000.
Other USA/Brazilian - expected revenues of US$91,000 is or roughly 7% of total generated from other sources.
Sponsored content - the site occasionally sells some sponsored posts when a direct request from client is received but without an in-house sales team - there is no active monetization of this strategy.
Affiliate Revenue
The business currently generates 12M in clicks a year = according to Amazon Affiliate data, the conversion rate is about 3% and the AOV (average order value) is $98 on Amazon, which drives about 2-3M of the 12M clicks. The business drives 9-10M clicks to it's other affiliate partner which sells higher value phones in Brazil and this source has a estimated 3% conversion rate and a higher $200 AOV (average order value). Using these calculations, we estimate that the business drives upwards of $62,820,000 in revenue for its partners (this number could be as low as $35M but as high as $75M). This represents a huge opportunity for the new owner to further capitalize on the market share this business has.
Financials
How has revenue been trending and why. Give exact examples of numbers and growth. What is the profit margin and how has it been trending.
Sales (USD)
2019 - $913,430
2020 - $1,091,692
2021 - $1,136,832
2022 - $1,142,051 (projected)
Profit (USD)
2019 - $669,918
2020 - $804,201
2021 - $813,858
2022 - $813,796 (projected)
Operations
While continuously investing in user experience optimization, the platform was developed as multi-device publishing system that:
Allows consumers to easily find the most relevant, best in-market deals
Downloads, stores and serves millions of products from affiliate feeds
Is optimized for technology products globally and scalable for new product verticals
Allows the most up-to-date prices and links to be served with articles
Has strong article match rates and conversions
Detects and counters ad blocking while enforcing respectful advertising policy to our users
The team has complete freedom to work on the topics previously selected by the chief editor, who works to balance the mix of affiliate-focused content given traffic in the most relevant areas. The teams typical targets include:
approximately 300 product reviews every year
20,000 news articles produced in a year (over 50 per day) including tests and analysis of devices, applications and services, rumors, leaks, promotions, forecasts and editorials.
360 videos per year (30 per month)
240 buying guides (20 per month)
5,500 social media posts a year (450 per month)
Team
The team consists of stellar journalists who live, breathe and cover tech 24/7, combining the strength of tech knowledge with their local expertise. The team of 22 shares a commitment to serve the readers with integrity, collaborate to deliver better results, and shape the future of digital publishing. The skills and specialization range from administrative, to social media experts, product analysts, news editors, video production/editing, deals & offers compilation. The team is located in Brazil and the editorial team is composed of freelancers with salaries based on content production and productivity while the entire organization is run by a shareholder-chief editor to ensure the best possible alignment of the management, editorial staff and owners. See attached Q&A for breakdown of employees.
Marketing & Brand
The website established its reputation in the eyes of the tech and consumer community through their trustworthy and independent, top of the line content and reviews. The secret sauce for success of the site originates from relentlessly engaging tech fans with distinctive content created with a focus on consumers’ need for trusted information, – and directing them to the best deals and offers they can find at that moment.
To put this trust in numbers, the company built up an immense social media presence: 250,000 Facebook likes, 211,000 Instagram fans, 56,000 Twitter followers, over 1 million YouTube subscribers and 10 million push notifications (permissions based on smart phones).
Partners
The website acts completely independently as there is no one single partnership that controls the flow of business. The team has great relationships with Samsung, Motorola, LG and others who provide devices for tests and analysis. In other cases, the devices are purchased to guarantee our independence and full coverage of released devices.
Affiliation revenues are largely coming from 3 main partners: Mosaico on a CPC basis, Amazon on a CPA basis and AWIN on a CPA basis. At the moment there is no direct relationship with a single merchant. As the website works only with large affiliation networks to make sure that the affiliation strategy is fully integrated in daily content production. All the link and offer management is fully automated by our proprietary platform through affiliation API. There is an automated algorithm for products and offers matching with no human effort needed.
Great content and reviews acts as a sales funnel for the affiliate partners and combined with ability to compare prices across 250 million products daily - the platform generates for 12 million clicks on affiliate offers, converting to 200,000 product sales valued at R$40M or US$8M.
Main Expenses
The bulk of the expenses, which have stayed stable over the past three years at around $270k, consists of salaries for the editorial and video production staff who are largely on a freelance basis with compensation tied to productivity. Total content production amounts to approximately $136k or 48% of total cost. IT and Management amount to $120k or 42% with the balance spent on tech support and admin.
Valuation
Purchase price of US$8.2 million is based on about a 10x Net Profit multiple given the company's impeccable reputation and trustworthy relationship with 8 million unique monthly visitors and immense social media following. Stable earnings and the high level of automation with regards to content generation and affiliate marketing makes this a perfect opportunity for buy and hold strategy. Significant growth is within reach for the new owner either through expansion across verticals or duplication of the business model in another market.
SEO Analysis (SEMRush)
Authority Score: 60
Backlinks: 1.1 million
Referring Domains: 7,200
Total Keywords: 1.6 million
World Website Rank: 3,796
Brazil Website Rank: 268
Expansion Opportunities for New Owner
Future development plan is to introduce new product categories and database to increase revenue from affiliation:
Tablets
Wearables
Hardware
Gadgets
ActionCams
Laptops
TVs
Monitors
Cameras
Develop and execute strategy behind Sponsored Content monetization, nearly non-existent at this point but with 20,000 articles published yearly - this presents a great opportunity
This business has 70M visitors/year but only 800k in profit = this business is making pennies on the dollar off of their traffic so a more affiliate-savvy owner will be able to capitalize off of this traffic and generate significantly higher revenue.
October, 2009 - (14 years old)
The following are included in the sale of this business:
The content creation component is run by the chief editor who is also a shareholder of the company. He will be staying with the company post the acquisition, maintaining his duties of managing the team to continue creating the content up to the same standards as before. Current owners are not involved in the content production process.
Affiliate and advertising contracts will also be transferred over to the new owner. The new owner can maintain the same strategy focused on just several partners or implement a more targeted marketing approach. As this piece of the business is mostly API-automated, the current owners spend on average 3 hours per week on staying in the loop on the business developments.
The owner doesn’t have a significant role in the business but they are open to coaching the new owner for a predefined period after the sale (to be determined).
This platform is just a part of the holdings owned by the current owners who are approaching retirement and seeking to divest certain non-core assets. Several industry players have approached the company but owners feel a more formal process is required to source potential buyers in a more professional way. Besides this, the owner has been involved for 13 years and his time has come to exit.
Ideal buyer could be anyone with a good business acumen to continue running the business as is. A digital media savvy investor, fund or aggregator can certainly see the synergistics opportunity from the roll-up strategy. Digital Media professionals will be able to roll out new verticals on the platform and potentially duplicate the business model in other geographies, outside of Brazil.