Teen Turns Down £8.5m For Website
A teenager has reportedly turned down £8.5million to sell his website because he is not interested. Sharpenews, a global news site aimed at young people, has been running for 5 years and has had 89million hits in 18 months and rakes in £2,500 a month from advertisers.
It's owner, 17-year-old Nick Coates four is currently A-levels and even works ten hours a week at a local electrical goods store and said, "I could walk away with about £4million - but I'm not interested in that at the moment."
Something doesn't seem right about this story. If you were a teenager and earned £2,500 a week and a company offered you £8.5 million for your website, you'd take it in an instant.
i think hes trying to avoid doing a "tom" from myspace, he sold myspace for a million next thing you know it was sold on about a mounth later for $580 million to news corp, with a recent deal with google for $900 million to provide a Google search facility and advertising on MySpace.
so basicly he got boned by a small programming company who then got boned by news corp. and the cicle is complete soon news corp will own all media! (seriously look em up!)
Posted by: ben | Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at 10:39 PM
Ben, I have no reason to doubt you but surely News Corp's boss would be pretty pissed off that the company could have bought MySpace for 1/580th of the amount just "about one month" earlier? Murdoch didn't become mega rich without some brains.
Do you have a link to the story? I'd love to know that News Corp was actually slow off the mark. (Sorry, it's late and I'm too tired to do a trawl through the internet.)
Posted by: Paul | Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at 11:03 PM
Wiki FTW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace#History
Posted by: Fish | Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 01:09 PM
I find it ironic, considering the site is currently down :)
Posted by: mooter | Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 06:54 PM
No i dont beleive Murdoch is an idiot remember he got back the price of the site plus 320 million from the google deal alone. many lucrative deals are no doubt still to come. Hes probly been already selling lists of emails for millions too.
It sounds paranoid but think of it he has instant data on millions of people at his fingertips, and the power to influence something that has millions of hits a day aswell. The benefits though unseen no doubt are alot more than money!
Posted by: ben | Friday, March 16, 2007 at 12:15 AM
I would sell it...my web page is about 3 weeks old and it makes little to no money...so would sell for real
Posted by: Neria Sebastien | Friday, March 16, 2007 at 11:58 AM
It would be rude not to thank you Ben. I'll keep you thoughts in mind and see where it all goes. I just think that, in the UK, if I owned a TV set, I HAVE to pay for the BBC which is way more influential than Murdoch could ever be. One has to choose to pay for Murdoch's media.
I don't actually pay for either. The internet is much more interesting!
Fish, thanks for what I should have done and just gone to Wikki.
Posted by: Paul | Friday, March 16, 2007 at 09:04 PM
Most likely, they added terms to the deal stating he'd get the money as stock that could only be sold after X # of years working as a VP helping to run the newly merged company. As a kid, that would be a scary proposition.
Posted by: Anita | Saturday, March 17, 2007 at 11:46 PM
No all wrong. Apparently He was just a sad little nerd trying to get publicity for his tacky web site - see link: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/139830
A new 'Piers Morgan' in the making perhaps?
Posted by: Carol Cheeveley | Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 01:47 AM