his soap opera blog sold for ~$9M
Ramon van Meer sold his soap opera blog SoapHub for just under $9 million, all cash, after building it in about three years with no outside investors.
“Little bit, uh, below $9 million, $8.75.”
Ramon couldn't code, wasn't a strong English writer, and had never seen a soap opera, so he bought a $49 WordPress theme and hired freelance writers. He built the most popular soap opera blog anyway by just doing the simple things.
“So I built a simple WordPress site. I bought a theme from ThemeForest, put it on WordPress, used photos.”
Ramon argues a content site needs a topic with a constant supply of new material. Soap operas air new episodes every weekday for 52 weeks, unlike Game of Thrones which only runs a few weeks a year and runs out of things to write about.
“I did see an opportunity, okay, there's not a lot of competition, the fans are super engaged, it's content that is every day. Like, soap operas are aired every single day for 52 weeks straight.”
Steal thisChoose a content niche with an endless, daily supply of new events to write about, not one that runs dry between seasons.
About 80% of SoapHub's traffic came from spoiler articles. 'What character are you' quizzes were used purely as an email-capture tool, building a list of close to 350,000 emails.
“Like, I think 80% of our traffic came from spoiler or spoiler-related articles. Unbelievable. Then of course we did you know, to get more content out because the more content you put out, the more traffic you get, you know, more traffic, more revenue.”
Ramon bought his first 30,000-40,000 Facebook page likes at under a penny each and spent under $1,000 total before the page grew organically, then sold the resulting site for nearly $9 million.
“You spent under $1,000 total unpaid for this website, built that asset up into something that you were able to sell for almost $9 million. So that's a tremendous, tremendous type of return.”
While only making about $5,000 a month, Ramon hired his first full-time employee. He knew it wasn't financially smart yet, but it freed him to focus on growth while someone else handled day-to-day operations.
“I was only making maybe $5,000 a month and then I hired a full-time person because I knew, okay, even though business-wise it's probably not smart, like you don't make enough to afford that, but I just, I just did it because I knew I can then focus on growth and then that person can focus on the day-to-day things.”
Steal thisHire your first operations person early so you can spend all your time on growth, even before the numbers say you can afford it.
Ramon notes there are only 4 soap operas still airing in the US, down from around 12-13 a decade earlier. Cancellation risk was a real threat to his content supply and his company's value, especially around contract-renewal time.
“soap operas are the only 4 airing, like only 4 in the United States. 10, 12 years ago, there were like 12 or 13, like, you know, the soap opera get canceled. So I was also, you know, thinking, oh man, what happens if 2 soap operas get canceled? Then I don't have content to write about or less content.”
At its peak SoapHub pulled in $400,000 to $500,000 a month in revenue with roughly $100,000 in monthly overhead, run by a team of four in-house plus a handful of freelance writers.
“And we're talking monthly, you're pulling in between $400,000 and $500,000 in revenue and overhead was, you know, $100-something, $100, you know, depending on the month. But we were a very small team. In-house were— was me and 3 others, and then a handful of writers.”
The broker first valued SoapHub at $5M, but revenue skyrocketed during the months-long sale process. Ramon called to delist; the act of pulling the listing made existing bidders raise their offers, sparking a bidding war that pushed the price far higher.
“So what happened by me pulling the listing, whoever was already interested in it now wanted more, even more, right? Like, I wish this was a genius friend of mine. Yeah, this was a pure, like, just happened. So a couple days later whoever first offered $5 million to say, okay, I want to, uh, I offer $6 million, and then another. So there was a bidding war, right, between initially 3 bidders and then 2, and eventually I had to choose one of them.”