XPmediacentre.com.au founder speaks on ReelTime deal

By Adam Turner
Friday, 28 September 2007 18:46

Entertainment

XPmediacentre.com.au founder Mike Hancock has reassured the forum's 40,000 members the site's acquisition by online video provider ReelTime will not impact on the forum's independence.

XPMediacentre is one of the world's largest online media centre communities, with over 160,000 unique browsers per month, 2.2 million monthly page views and a subscriber base of over 40,000. Hancock signed the deal with ReelTime today, selling the site for $150,000 of ReelTime shares plus share options. Unfortunately for Hancock, ReelTime issued details of the deal to the Australian Stock Exchange today before he was able to inform forum moderators and members of the deal.

Hancock was caught be surprise by ReelTime's quick ASX announcement and was unable to respond immediately to the concerns of disgruntled forum members. They spent several hours discussing the deal on the site, with many accusing Hancock of "selling out" and fearing for the independence of the site. Their concerns were fuelled by a mistake in ReelTime's initial media release, which incorrectly stated the ReelTime would now be moderating the forum.

While some forum members feel their community has been sold from under them, that is not the intention and the deal is primarily focused on advertising and moving the site to Australian hosting, said Hancock in an exclusive interview with ITWire.

"I've never managed the advertising on XPmediacentre to its full potential. If you look on Google you will see the site ranks extremely well and I generated a lot of traffic - over 2 million page views per month. The people at ReelTime are in the media business and they've got advertising contacts, so they can monitise the site far better than I can," Hancock says.

"ReelTime is going to have a positive influence. They've got absolutely no intentions of messing with the independent nature of the site because that would be stupid. They understand that this community is built on the back of people helping people and if they start commercialising it they'll just screw it up. They're very aware of all that, they don't want to screw up the site and they want me to stay on and the moderators to stay on."

While ReelTime will have no influence over moderating discussions, it will be able to use the site as "a vehicle to communicate their offering to a large existing user base," Hancock says.

"I've got a user base of 40,000 people that they can communicate with, now that's a very big user base - of which probably 70 per cent is Australian. If they're trying to establish themselves as an online content provider in Australia, then they've got that focused user base to start with plus traffic that's visiting the site." CONTINUED