From an Italian Side Blog to Industry Standard: EventMB's Sale to Skift After Two Failed Deals
EventMB began in 2007 as a side blog in southern Italy and grew into the specialist media outlet for event technology, with 50,000 subscribers and 300,000 monthly visits, before selling to travel-industry media giant Skift in 2019 (price undisclosed). The story spans two collapsed deals, a husband-and-wife operation, and the rare ending in which a pandemic became a tailwind after the sale.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
Timeline
| Period | Event |
|---|---|
| 2007 | Julius Solaris starts it as a side blog in southern Italy (theme: events × technology) |
| 2011 | First advertisers arrive; monetization begins |
| 2016 | Moves to Las Vegas on an EB1 visa for “individuals of extraordinary ability” |
| 2017 | Sells the side business ShowThemes, a WordPress theme shop, to Imagely for six figures (put toward a house down payment) |
| September 2019 | Sells to Skift (closing on the third attempt; the previous two fell through) |
| 2020 | The pandemic makes virtual events explode. The former EventMB (Skift Meetings) beats its revenue targets |
The Numbers
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Subscribers | 50,000+ |
| Monthly visits | 300,000 |
| Team | Solaris + his wife Carmen Boscolo + 7 freelancers |
| Sale price | Undisclosed |
From “Creator” to “Media Company”
The turning point was Boscolo joining as employee number two and reorganizing the blog into a media business. Solaris’s reflection cuts deep: “Being a creator and growing a business are, in many cases, incompatible.” Splitting the work between the person who writes the content and the person who handles sales, organization, and the numbers is what enabled the upgrade into an “industry-standard information source” — industry reports, research, conference keynotes.
The sale closed on the third attempt, brokered by a Skift events reporter who was an old acquaintance. Having lived through two failed deals, Solaris’s takeaway is “Know your worth” — a collapsed deal is not a failure but a lesson in price and terms.
Reading Between the Numbers
A sale is not something you close in one attempt. Succeeding on the third try after two collapses is the same root pattern as PsychCentral’s negotiation of ratcheting up from the first offer: the experience of negotiating multiple times is itself what builds a seller’s pricing ability. The worst pattern is losing heart after the first collapse and selling cheap.
A spouse moving onto the business side is the minimal, rational form of team-building. Like the FeedbackPanda couple and BeQuick’s family operation, it complements skill sets at zero trust cost. For a creator-type solo business to become a sellable company, someone other than the creator has to own the running of it.
Luck in exit timing counts as skill — but only when the groundwork is laid. Six months after the sale, the pandemic hit, and by irony the acquisition became a huge success on the virtual-events boom. Twelve years of digging at “events × tech” held its greatest value at the exact moment the environment convulsed. Going deep on a niche is also insurance against a demand explosion you can’t schedule.
Related Cases
Sources
This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.