Why Seamless Acquisition of MenuPages is Exciting to Me

It was announced yesterday that Seamless, the company that recently changed its name from Seamless Web, acquired MenuPages.com from New York Magazine. This news is exciting to me and I want to share why I think it’s exciting.

If you aren’t aware already, MenuPages is a helpful website that lists menus from restaurants in large cities and tourist hubs around the US and the world. The website started out as a resource for people to find menus from restaurants across New York City, and it grew pretty quickly. I’ve used Menu Pages for several years and probably use it more than any local, non-news website.

The reason I find this news exciting is that it shows that hard work and dedication to an online brand can lead to a big payday. If you create something useful to visitors and have them coming back to your site on a regular basis, there will always be someone that wants to pay a premium price for those eyeballs.

I don’t think MenuPages had a great revenue model, aside from Adsense monetization (if they did I missed it). The company probably didn’t make a ton of money. However, they had a huge audience of people that were ready to order dinner or lunch and visited frequently. That’s where Seamless comes in to the picture. Menu Pages didn’t offer the connectivity for people to order food, but Seamless does. I think Seamless will be able to better monetize the traffic than New York Magazine and the founders.

I’ve been asked about selling DogWalker.com a number of times, but I haven’t even considered selling. I don’t need the liquidity, and I do want the Ā recurring Ā revenue stream. However, if a large company that was in the industry would pay a premium because they could monetize it more than I could, then I would certainly consider selling. I would bet that within a few years, I will sell my portfolio of pet websites to a company that can better monetize the traffic. I don’t know who the buyer will be or when, but I bet it will happen.

If you are building a business, the current revenue is not necessarily the most important thing. Building something that people find useful should be the key, and the money will come in later if you’ve done that.

As a domain investor speaking to other domain investors though, I must urge you to have a look at Nat’s post from yesterday. It was well written and is something you need to consider.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

7 COMMENTS

  1. Very Good Post Elliot
    You should write one on how you have evolved from domaining to blogging to doing a few websites etc and how much time each takes up. You must burn it at both ends some days.

  2. I read Nat’s post and it shook my confidence with my city restaurants dot com sites. Then this news of another restaurant related site acquisition stabilized me. Thank you.

  3. “I would bet that within a few years, I will sell my portfolio of pet websites to a company that can better monetize the traffic.”

    My guess is Alex Tabibi will buy them šŸ™‚

  4. Menupages has had significantly more revenue from Adsense! Remember they were part of New York Magazine and had their own dedicated advertising sales team selling premium advertising placements. There aren’t many other sites that so accurately target specific demographics (eg New York or DC foodies) like Menupages and so it served a profitable niche. Right now there is a large Delta Airlines banner I have personally run ads for Belvedere Vodka on Menupages and healthy CPM’s.

    Of course the real exciting part is seeing the web move past brochure style (or menu style!) content and into smart services. The real joy of Seamlessweb is eliminating the incoherent phone order takers as well as making the financial transaction, well, seamless. I hope to see more of this into the future.

    As an aside, dogwalker looks interesting. Have a look at my site “hey walkies.com”

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