After completing buyouts of FlickSmart.com and Rentflixxx.com in early November, WantedList.com has announced the acquisition of two-year-old VTO Enterprises – home to online rental sites VideoTakeout.com and FlickCentral.com.
The deal, for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock, will add VTO’s New Jersey-based distribution center to the Wanted List fold – the company’s second distribution hub and first on the East Coast.
“The biggest benefit to all of our customers is that we’ll have dual distribution centers. For our East Coast customers one of the biggest reasons for attrition is the long turn-around time. We won’t have that problem anymore,” WantedList.com owner Anh Tran told AVNOnline.com.
In addition, VTO president Dennis Consorte will take over as the Wanted List director of affiliate marketing, a position Tran said the company hasn’t been able to adequately fill in the past.
“We thought it would be an easy program for an affiliate manager to run, but clearly that hasn’t been the case, so we wanted to bring in a real professional. Dennis monitors a couple of online webmaster boards, he knows a lot about traffic and trading traffic with other webmasters out there. This is an area I really wanted to focus on with all of the new things we’re going to be doing in the next year,” Tran said.
Those new things will include co-branded stores, allowing webmasters to have their own Adult DVD rental store. The co-branded stores should be introduced in January, which is also when the integration of Wanted List and VTO should be complete, Tran said.
Both operations are run similarly and that should ease the transition period, according to Consorte, who has been working on the deal with Tran for three months.
“I’m really excited about this. This has been something I think we’ve all wanted for a while to find a way to make things work even better than they already are – take everybody’s strength, put them together and have a really solid organization,” Consorte said.
Until the integration is complete, VTO’s customers will still be able to log in to their respective sites. User names and passwords will remain the same when they are transferred to Wanted List.
As for VTO operations, most of the staff will remain and since Wanted List will be moving part of their warehouse to the East Coast, there will also be new hires.
For Tran and company, it has been a busy year. The latest move will add a subscriber base of four figures, but consolidating the entire industry into Wanted List isn’t necessarily the goal.
“After the FlickSmart deal we got a couple of phone calls from other companies,” he said. “For us, this isn’t about buying other companies out and wiping them out. It’s really about getting the best of the best.”
