UPDATE: GrabUp has been sold at the “Buy It Now” price of $20,000 USD. That’s actually half of what the initial buyout price was, but the seller cut it in half to speed up the sale.

When is it too soon to sell a site? A lot of people worry about waiting too long to sell their websites. They’re concerned if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, and cash in on recent revenue stats, that they might not make the most possible from the sale of their sites.

An Example of Selling Too Soon?

There’s a great Mac-only piece of software out there called GrabUp that lets you quickly take snapshots of your screen and upload them to the web for you to share with others. The program is snappy and the system for uploading is extremely fast and efficient. It’s a great product that just recently launched an extended version that, for a small cost, lets you get even more out of the software. The future looks bright for GrabUp.

That future, unfortunately, is going to belong to someone other than the program’s creator.

GrabUp is currently up for sale over at SitePoint. This sale comes only one week after the “pro” version of the software has been available. In that week the profit has been $1,060. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at and the owner is using that figure to justify their “Buy It Now” price.

It feels to me like the seller might be rushing into this one a bit. I obviously don’t know, or pretend to know, their financial situation of course. But with sales figures like that so early in the game, with little promotion from what the seller is claiming, it seems like they’d be better served holding on for at least a few more months.

Here’s the other problem with selling so fast. It makes potential buyers skeptical. You immediately ask yourself, when first seeing this sale, “Why is he selling already? What’s the problem?” If you do a little research, you find out GrabUp has actually been up for sale before and then the deal was cancelled. That’s going to raise concern as well.

Software is a tricky game to play. I know that from experience working at the enterprise level. It’s just as hard at the consumer level, of course. But when you have an apparent hit on your hands it might be best to stick to it and see where it leads you. As opposed to jumping ship for your next project at the first sight of a payday.

Our friends in Boston have launched the public beta of their new startup, TicketStumbler, this week. Anyone who loves to see live sporting events will find this site useful. As an aggregator for the lucrative secondary ticket market, TicketStumbler allows users to search all of the ticket listings on the various third-party ticket sites in one place.

TicketStumbler has a really nice look and interface with cool slider widgets and an easy to navigate listing of the tickets for each event. Their search runs on natural language and they have geolocation features as well to show you upcoming events near your location. I don’t know how many tickets or events they’re currently storing but it has to be a pretty large figure; over 1 million tickets at least.

Right now, the site only lists tickets for the current seasonal sports in the United States: NFL, MLB, NCAA Football and the NHL. I’d assume the NBA is coming soon once we get closer to the start of the season.

For all of us in northern Ohio, on the edge of our seats for the upcoming football season, TicketStumbler has a great Cleveland Browns section with seats to all of the games this year.

In between client work I’ve been getting more and more involved in various “make money online” ventures to help supplement my income.

Unfortunately, most of these projects require lots of unique and well-written content. I don’t have the time or motivation to sit down and write all of this content on my own so I’ve been going with third-party service providers to lend me a hand. I think I’ve finally found a service I can rely on for all of my writing and content needs called Textbroker.

At Textbroker, you create an account and then build orders for pieces of content you’d like written. Your orders contain the individual topics you want written about, the expected word count and the quality of the writing you’re looking for. The pricing is based on price per word so higher quality content will be more expensive but have better style and grammar.

When you’re done entering in your specifics, the order is then submitted to the site moderators to be verified and added to the system. Once verified, your order is presented to all of the site’s registered writers who can then pick and choose what pieces of content they would like to write. When a writer is finished with one of your articles, Textbroker’s system emails you and then asks you to login to either approve the content or ask for revisions. It’s that simple.

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s a site I recently had built using content from Textbroker’s members: Vegas Casinos Direct

On Monday, hipster cool video sharing site Vimeo issued a statement regarding their new policy towards video game related uploads. You can read their announcement on their blog and, if you’re man enough, you can then plow through the 750+ comments from their community members. The gist of the new policy is that any content related to video games will automatically be deleted from the site. This includes all previously uploaded video game movies as well.

Their reasoning for this decision is two-fold. One of their points of reason is that these particular types of videos are resource hogs. Since the number of video game movie uploaders is such a small percentage of their userbase, but taking up the majority of the resources, I can understand their decision to no longer allow that kind of content.

If they had just left it at that I don’t think this whole issue would have blown up into the debacle it has become. But things get a bit messy with their other line of reasoning for the new policy. Here it is straight from one of their staff members:

Vimeo was created with the intent of inspiring creativity and providing a place to share video with friends and family. The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute “creative expression”. Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these.

Yikes. So the staff at Vimeo is now dictating what is and isn’t “creative expression” now? That’s a pretty thin layer of ice these guys are skating on with that statement. It’s especially ridiculous when there are quite a few videos on Vimeo that many could argue don’t constitute creative expression. This high-brow stance is kind of off-putting to someone like myself who isn’t a registered Vimeo user but is a big fan of the site and the people who run it.

If you decide to read some of the comments (I stopped after I got into the 600s) you can see Vimeo’s attitude on this really shine through. Some of their remarks are a little discouraging towards their users (most of whom are video game movie uploaders that will be leaving now with this policy change). There’s also a some double talk throughout regarding their fears of legal recourse for allowing game footage on their site. They say they aren’t concerned but it’s mentioned specifically in the quote I used above.

Like I said, I’m a big fan of Vimeo and the people behind-the-scenes but I’m pretty sure this could have been handled a lot better than it was. Hopefully they’ve learned a lot from this experience. I’m 100% positive they feel they’ve done the right thing (and they probably have) but their methods leave a lot to be desired.

Last month I said I didn’t have a lot of faith in the accuracy of eBay’s statistics for their affiliate program.

A big problem myself and other affiliates within the program saw was a serious decrease in the amount of ACRUs our sites were getting. eBay continuously denied their was a problem.

Well, guess what? We were right and eBay was wrong.

From the eBay Partner Network blog comes a post, on July 3rd during the news vacuum of the Fourth of July holiday here in America:

As we mentioned on the discussion boards, we’ve identified an issue affecting the way ACRUs were being attributed to affiliates. Although on the eBay Partner Network we use the same underlying tracking system as on Commission Junction (Value Click’s MediaPlex), when we switched to the eBay Partner Network a small issue was introduced where in certain circumstances ACRUs were not credited to the right affiliate. Many but not all of our affiliates were affected.

So there you go. At least they’ve admitted their mistake and are starting to make amends. The bad part of this mess is that they’ve denied there was a problem since the program launched even though all of their affiliates knew something wasn’t working right with the ACRU tracking.