You have a great idea, a great product and now all you need it to get the word out there. continue reading...
The following is a perpetual-work-in-progress. Once you start to compile a list of mergers and acquisitions, you realize why it’s nearly impossible to have a complete list. We are quite confident that the following is a very good, comprehensive list of the largest, more notable deals… but it is not - and no list will be - fully complete because there are too many countries around the world and too many industries to report (it is highly possible that the Wall Street Journal or Financial Post, for example, has such a list… but it would be thick and unwieldy).
We have included: continue reading...
Paid Content reports that RH Donnelly bid the highest for Business.com, going all the way up to $345M for the company that started off with a $7.5M purchase of a URL and a subsequent $10M funding round.
RHD, a publicly traded firm, did $1.895B in 2006 revenues, but only 2% of that (according to PaidContent) - or $38M - came from the Web. So, to remain relevant in the 21st century, it is spending over 10x that in order to reposition itself and strengthen its online presence. In a way, it makes sense, I can’t for the life of me imagine upcoming and existing generations turning to books and print in general for directories and what not… continue reading...
Last week I wrote: Ask.com should stop spending $100M per year in ads and buy up new search companies, then once bloggers began to increasingly criticize its ad strategy (and thus put the company in the spotlight), I asked maybe I owed them an apology, after all, it encourages folks like yours truly and many others online to put forth what Ask.com should be stressing. I doubt the thinkers at Crispin Porter Bogusky actually planned it that way, but welcome to marketing: where you get paid regardless and someone will find a way to suggest you’re brilliant.
Anyway, today the New York Times talks about how more and more people are still launching search-based startups, and how backers like Sequoia - who invested in both Yahoo! and Google - are still open to suggestions. continue reading...
This morning I woke up and got a bad feeling that we were back in crazy times. The WSJ ran a story about how Business.com was about to get the last laugh in a sale of the company for $300-400M. Insanity, I thought. After all, insanity means doing the same thing but expecting a different outcome. It’s a pillar of the current Administration, some would argue.
But what is different this time around, is that it’s not simply a URL that is being sold, there’s an actual business there. continue reading...
