WeedMaps Media buys Marijuana.com for $4.2 million

WeedMaps will merge with Marijuana.com to create the one-stop online source for all things cannabis

Christmas has come early for potheads, it seems, as an announcement broke Tuesday that WeedMaps Media bought the domain name Marijuana.com, to place all things internet and marijuana under one convenient banner.

"The URL was purchased for $4.2M under terms I'm not able to disclose," said WeedMaps CEO Justin Hartfield to VatorNews."It was an internal investment and we took no outside money."

WeedMaps is an online service that, much like the name suggests, offers directories to legal outlets to buy marijuana and marijuana-related products. Most such places are in California. It also has a robust online forum community, with the site bringing in 10M monthly pageviews.

Meanwhile, Marijuana.com is currently a marijuana news and bulletin board forum, rating at some 3.5 million unique page views per month, generating revenue mostly through the sale of ad space. By merging of these two sites, WeedMaps Media is hoping to create the ultimate "all weed, all the time" website of choice.

The new Marijuana.com will provide all-new content, including user-generated reviews, videos, and other community-focused material. "On the new site, we plan to significantly upgrade the...software, driving it by the latest message forum technology (Xenforo)," said Hartfield. "We plan to incentivize the community to attract more users to the forum, via giveaways and prizes not currently offered."

"The biggest addition to the existing forum will be the ability for users to rate and review all sorts of medical cannabis related products, like Vaporizers, Grinders, Joint Papers, etc," continued Hartfield, in our interview. He indicated that the business model of the new Marijuana.com will be a combination of banner ads with their current "directory listing" fee service, where they charge marijuana manufacturers and vendors for featured service listings.

The full transfer of the current online property by WeedMaps Media to Marijuana.com will take place early in 2012. "Currently the site is with the designer, and we hope to have a beta version ready for testing by January," said Hartfield.

 The new Marijuana.com will also automatically transfer  the old site's membership to the new one. "Weedmaps.com/Forums will also be ported over to the message board to give it even more of a boost," said Hartfield. "Users will be able to sign in with their existing Marijuana.com account or existing Weedmaps.com account, so no friction there."

"It will also significantly expand the reach of our video content on Weedmaps.TV, which will be prominently embedded before the fold on the new site," said Hartfield.

Sounds like it will be high times indeed over at the new Marijuana.com. *cough, cough*