This is the location of all of the server traffic reports generated by Analog over the past 8 1/2 months:
http://cartoongifs.com/analog_stats/
CartoonGIFs.com Funny Cartoon eCards from ARG!
Established 10 yr old PR5 site, 700 unique licensed cartoon cards
http://cartoongifs.com/
Auction
Congratulations to the winner!
- Winning Bid:
- $2,500
- Bid History:
- 22 Bids (0 Pending)
- Listed:
- Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:58:05 GMT
Accepted Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal, Escrow.com
Description
For those who have always wanted to start their own e-card site, here's a great opportunity. For almost 10 years this has been a top ecard site, fully set-up and functional, plus it includes exclusive license to 700 unique cartoon ecards that cannot be found on any other card site. Established in 2000 by ARG! Cartoon Animation, CartoonGIFs.com has exclusive license to all of these cards.
Although ARG! licenses its cartoons for literally hundreds of other uses, including web graphics, cell phone MMS greetings, wallpaper, T-shirts, TV commercials, video production, emails and many others, the company has never licensed any of its intellectual properties as eCards. Until now, this license has been maintained for the exclusive use of ARG's own card site, CartoonGIFs.com. Now this exclusive content is included in this sale!
The main ARG! Cartoon Animation website at www.artie.com gets up to 73 million hits a month, and recorded over a billion hits (one thousand million hits) in a 20-month period. The sale of this site includes perpetual links from artie.com, flash.artie.com, toons.artie.com, cards.artie.com, games.artie.com and many other sites controlled by CityStar Group, Inc., ARG's parent company. This will give the new site owner a built-in marketing program with no recurring cost.
One partial copy of the site exists at http://cards.artie.com, but that site does not actually send the cards, it simply feeds traffic into CartoonGIFS.com, where the cards are customized by the endusers, notification is sent to the recipients, and the finished cards are hosted for 10 days to be viewed by recipients and senders. We would assume that the new owner would want ARG! Cartoon Animation to maintain this site for the purpose of pushing traffic to CartoonGIFs.com, but we will certainly be willing to shut this site down if the buyer prefers.
The card script written by BigNoseBird.com is fully customizable to allow the finished cards to always include links to your business website, your business logo, etc.
The card gallery includes over 175 pages of cards, with 4 cards per page. Category pages for Armed Forces Day, Birthday cards, Christmas, Columbus Day, Easter, Father's Day, Flag Day, Get Well, Graduation, Halloween, Independence Day, Labor Day, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Mothers Day, New Years, St. Patricks Day, Thanksgiving, Thank You, Valentines Day and more are also included, some of which have multiple pages of cards.
The site also has a built-in search engine to allow endusers to search by category or keyword. The search function is a simple CGI script that uses a flat file database, which is just a text file listing all of the available cards. Over 2,800 entries help users find cards based on many relevant keywords.
During busy holiday seasons the CartoonGIFs.com site's users have sent out up to 600 cards a day. This helps to propagate the site to new users, and all of this exposure can easily be harnessed to help build your brand.
Revenue Details
Please see the attached files and links to additional information in the notes below.
Traffic Details
Again, please see the attached files, and additional links in the notes below.
Attachments 3 public (0 verified)
Questions 6 public, 0 deleted
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:54:25 GMT
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:00:08 GMT
Here is the complete Adsense revenue report for CartoonGIFs.com, covering each day since we signed the site up for the Adsense program in July, 2004. It shows that the company has made a total of $4,370.91 on Adsense.
http://cartoongifs.com/Adsense.html
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:17:34 GMT
How come ther is an exact clone of this site at http://cards.artie.com/
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:39:17 GMT
One partial copy of the site exists at http://cards.artie.com, but that site does not actually send the cards, it simply feeds traffic into CartoonGIFS.com, where the cards are customized by the endusers, notification is sent to the recipients, and the finished cards are hosted for 10 days to be viewed by recipients and senders.
We would assume that the new owner would want ARG! Cartoon Animation to maintain this site for the purpose of pushing traffic to CartoonGIFs.com, but we will certainly be willing to shut this site down if the buyer prefers.
-
- Posted by:
- Date:
- Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:12:30 GMT
FAQ #1
Q. Do you have Google Analytics stats for the site? Can you tell us what keywords the site ranks for in the search engines?
A. We do not use Google Analytics. Frankly we tried using it on a couple of our sites and we could not figure out how to get it to work :)
If you look at the Analog reports at:
http://cartoongifs.com/analog_stats
...you can click on "Search Query Report" on each report and see what keywords are bringing people in from the search engines. FYI, the primary generator of traffic is from hundreds of links on our other very popular sites, and these links will be maintained for the new owner in perpetuity (forever). Such a deal!
Q. Is it easy to have new eCards added to the system?
A. Yes, all you need is a licensed image or animation, a thumbnail of it, just add it to the search database using a good text editor, add it to a gallery page, a preview page and a card creator page by cloning the code from an existing card. It probably takes us about 15 minutes altogether to add a new card.
Q. What would it cost to license more of them from ARG?
A. We can sell you an 8 CD collection of 57,000 original images and animations for $99.95 plus shipping, and as the owner of this site, we will include a special, exclusive license to use all of them as cards. I would estimate that there are at least about 500 more card-worthy animations in this collection.
Q. Also, can you explain why ARG is selling the site?
A. We have too many businesses, and we really need to focus. In 2008, before we started selling businesses, we had 8 full businesses doing completely different things. We used to have two full ISPs and a web design/hosting company, we ran an SEO company and at one time we even ran a medium sized ad agency including TV and print media. We are working on getting down to just 2 major businesses, which are:
1. The National Website Directory at www.citystar.com and
2. the ARG! animation studio.We made a ton of money on all of these enterprises, so when we sold each business, it was really more to achieve focus than to cash out.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:59:43 GMT
FAQ #2
Q. How much income per month does AdSense generate on CartoonGifs?
A. There is an Excel spreadsheet in the attachments listed above of all our Adsense history. It actually works out to an average of $66 per month over the 5+ year history of Adsense participation. But in calculating the site's income, we failed to consider that we sold text links on the site directly, and sold quite a few downloads and CD ROM cartoon collections from the site as well.
So the reality is that when we listed our income for this site, we understated our gross income substantially. The site has actually been making more than $160 per month over the last six months.
Q. If I win the auction, will you help me move the site to my server?
A. Yes, we will configure the 2 CGI scripts to work on your server, and search and replace the site owner info on all the pages, including the card script. That is about all it will take. We will give you FTP access to the current server to get all the files, and we will need a bit of technical information about your server in order to configure the scripts. This is all designed for Linux or UNIX, by the way, and won't work on a Windows server.
Q. Do the cards on the site generate income, or are they offered as an enticement?
A. Since there are so many cards, they generate a lot of page views by users browsing the site, which creates ad revenue. Nobody pays to send ecards, it's strictly an advertising supported business.
Q. How many pages are on CartoonGifs?
A. Right now there are 1,786 pages altogether. Each of the 700 cards has a preview page.
Q. Who build the site? What web editor was used?
A. The site was built by Artie Romero, ARG's founder and president, using a text editor. The design is based on the templates that came with the BigNoseBird.com ecard script. But you could use Frontpage or Dreamweaver, whatever you like, really. We like using a powerful text editor because we can update all the pages with search and replace on disk across directories (you don't even have to load them into the editor).
Q. Who did all the animations on the site?
A. They were mostly produced in-house at ARG, but a few came from freelancers. The heavy lifting was done by Artie Romero. He has been working as an animation director since 1981 professionally, and he founded ARG in 1994. Over the years, ARG has had many other talented animators on staff, and hired a few dozen interns. These animations were all done in their spare time between commercial animation jobs.
Q. How much time does it take to maintain the site? What kind of skills are needed?
A. Unless you want to expand it, no maintenance is required. At this point it is a totally automated business. Google will even do direct deposit, so you don't even have to take the checks to the bank.
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