Online adult DVD sales/rental house WantedList.com has acquired competitors FlickSmart.com and Rentflixxx.com.
The three companies will be merged under the WantedList banner, with WantedList.com acquiring the customers, inventory, marketing deals, and affiliates from both companies. The FlickSmart and Rentflixxx warehouses will be closed and their inventory will be added to WantedList’s Van Nuys, California warehouse, according to WantedList.com co-founder Anh Tran.
“We’re trying to consolidate the market so there is one dominant player – taking the best and brightest, the entrepreneurs who helped start these businesses and getting them on board so we can get the brand momentum and customer acquisition momentum that it takes to become a company like NetFlix, in terms of size,” Tran told AVNOnline.com.
The acquisitions will boost WantedList.com’s DVD selection by 2,000 to 3,000 titles, to roughly 13,000.
However, the goal of the acquisitions is not just to add inventory and customers, but to compete with larger companies. Tran and FlickSmart CEO and founder John Wells, who will join the WantedList.com board of directors, believe the key customers are fans of Adult who have been reluctant to go to a video store and rent an adult DVD – with the anonymity offered by online renting being the key.
Down the road, Wells said the company may offer mainstream titles to compete with online DVD rental giants like the aforementioned NetFlix.
“The way the small video stores survive against the Blockbusters and the Hollywood Videos is not by offering more new releases, it’s by having that little room in the back where people rent Adult movies,” Wells said.
“If we can get a good enough footprint in the Adult space, then we’d like to add a catalog of non-Adult movies so our customers can have a better value and so we can start going over that bridge to get consumers who don’t want to subscribe to an Adult-only site,” Wells said.
In the meantime, while WantedList will get larger by adding the bulk of FlickSmart’s employees, Rentflixxx’s Indiana-based operations will be shut down completely, according to Tran. Each company’s brand and Web site will remain for the time being, although WantedList will handle all business aspects.
Customers of FlickSmart.com and Rentflixxx.com will be able to log in at either of the Web sites with their existing user name and password, but will not be able to use their existing account at WantedList.com for approximately two weeks.
So far, the transition has been seamless, with only minor changes left to be made on the Web, and seems to have been expedited by existing relationships. Before WantedList executives began negotiating to acquire FlickSmart, FlickSmart’s Wells was already negotiating with Rentflixxx owner Brad Hudson to acquire his company. In addition, Wells and Tran have worked together on various projects to reduce fraud, improve customer privacy and increase efficiency for their businesses.
“We’ve always talked and hinted to, whoever does better will take on the other company. In the last three months we started getting serious with our discussions,” Tran said.
