Twitch.tv was purchased this week by Amazon for $970 million, the little experiment that grew out of Justin.tv has become a major player in online video. For a long it was rumored that Google would acquire Twitch. Now we know it is Amazon and two questions remain, 1) When will Amazon buy Twitch.com ? and 2) For how much ?
The UFC also had an issue with the .com getting spillover traffic from its UFC.tv and eventually purchased UFC.com. UFC.tv shows videos while the .com is the main hub for the UFC brand.
This situation has some similarities, although not identical to Flickr and Flicker.com. The similarities exist in the fact that both Flickr.com and Twitch.tv were acquired by one of the major players online and both were leaking a substantial amount of traffic to other domains they did not control.
Flicker.com was registered in 1998 and Flickr.com was registered in 2003. Flickr went on to be wildly successful and was acquired in 2005 by Yahoo. Flicker.com was acquired by Hong Kong business Ashanti for $55,000 in 2006. Back in 2007, Yahoo reportedly offered the owners $600,000, but was turned down. Yahoo then filed a lawsuit against Ashanti for cybersquatting, trademark infringement, false designation of origin, dilution, and unfair competition. The case was dismissed last week by Yahoo after the parties came to some sort of agreement. (via Petapixel)
Flicker had posted in March of 2006 that it was not for sale and provided a link to those looking for Flickr. At the end of June 2006 the site was updated to say that a new website would be up shortly at the beginning of July. On July 7 there was a new homepage but it was just a parked page.
Then in May of 2007 the domain that was not for sale, was for sale.
So from the 2006 stats we see Flicker was getting 5,000 unique visitors a day.
By 2009 the stats looked like this:
So now back to Twitch, in a story that was done in the New York Times, the writer spoke to Peter Kay the owner of Twitch.com:
Peter Kay has owned Twitch.com since the mid-1990s. Before Twitch.tv, which was started just three years ago, he had barely any traffic to his site. Now, he routinely gets 40,000 unique visitors a day for his site, which promotes his music educational apps; on Tuesday, he got 60,000 visitors. Yesterday, he sold 10 apps about Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” at $5.99 each.
“I had no master plan,” he said. “But it keeps me in beer money.”
It would seem to me that a company with the size and status of Amazon should want to purchase Twitch.com and get those 40,000 daily unique visitors coming back into the fold.
If you owned Twitch.com what would your asking price be knowing that the buyer is Amazon ?
