Splitcoast Stampers Sold

Splitcoast Stampers co-founder Daven Nolta announced Friday that the site has been sold for the second time in under two years.

NameMedia, which acquired the site 19 months ago from co-founders Daven and Tracy Nolta, has sold it to Internet Brands.  Two other properties, Craftster.org and Dave's Garden, were bundled in the sale. Splitcoast was founded in 2002, and averages over half a million unique visitors every month.

Internet Brands operates over 90 websites that pull an average of 50 million monthly unique visitors. It is a public company, listed on the NASDAQ (symbol: INET). The company just reported $27.7 million in revenue for the 4th quarter of 2009 with $4.3 million in net income. These results were up over the 2008 numbers.

In the sale announcement, Nolta also indicated that he would no longer be involved in Splitcoast Stampers "in any official capacity". Community Manager Jenn Balcer is also leaving her position. Creative Director Beate Johns and Advertising Account Manager Lori Craig will be continuing in their positions.

Wade Hewitt will be in charge of Splitcoast Stampers for Internet Brands, and actually attended CHA with Splitcoast before the announcement was made. In a post introducing himself on the site's message board, he revealed that Internet Brands had originally been in discussions about purchasing Splitcoast at the time of its sale to NameMedia. Hewitt has also made forum posts reassuring members that the company has no plans to convert Splitcoast into a paid membership community, and that the site's current arrangements for features like the private forum for Stampin' Up demos will remain unchanged.

Hewitt also discussed technical changes that are in progress at Splitcoast. Migration to a new ad server is complete and in early March the transition will be made to hosting the site on servers at Internet Brands' web hosting facility.