Forum Moderators: buckworks
Shopzilla shareholders would also get Shopzilla's net working capital at the time of closing, estimated at about $35 million.
[reuters.com...]
1st eBay buying Shopping.com and now this, who be next?
Shak
Having said that, half a billion does seem a bit high, and Scripps is a strange buyer as they are not really in the Internet business like other recent purchasers of shopping engines.
I'd say they have some knowledge of the interent biz... i love foodnetwork.com ;)
Scripps already is one of the top-50 drivers of Web traffic through its combination of national and local online brands. Scripps national television network Web sites include FoodNetwork.com, HGTV.com, DIYNetwork.com, fineliving.com, gactv.com and ShopatHomeTV.com. Scripps Internet brands also include United Media's Comics.com and Web sites operated by the company's local newspapers and broadcast television stations.
depends
according to other posts, shopzilla gets a lot of visitors and the buyer has a lot of existing web sites etc - just think how much traffic they could drive to their other sites and the income they could make - or maybe one of their other sites /services could really benefit from a shopzilla type service ........ they might just make their money back several times over in a short time .......
Phil, I work pretty closely with a competitor to FoodNetwork.com - the dominant site in the online recipe space. The reason they are so dominant is because Scripps is very good at coordinating its media efforts - shows on FoodTV are promoted on FoodNetwork.com, and features/recipes on FoodNewtwork.com are promoted on FoodTV. It's a powerful combination.
No doubt, they think they can get the same uhhh... for lack of a better word.... synergies... between their shopping channels and Shopzilla.
My bet is on IAC and Experian and also i believe both nextag and pricegrabber will be bought!.
IAC
International Aerobatics Club.. yeah their the next big buyers. :)
How on earth...man, I just don't understand this nonsense.
Maybe, it's just because I cannot possibly fathom what it would be like to have 5.25 million dollars, let alone 525 million...
LOL Jack! . Now as IAC is selling its stake in Vivendi Universal for $3.4 billion expect more internet acquistions by them this year!
>> Experian have already gone for utility comparisons with LMB.
I know ,IMO they are silently working on to become a major ecommerce player
First and foremost MSN is rebuilding their own comparsion site and AMZN has been a comparsion site with a large network of merchants for years. So as others have mentioned don't look to these guys to pick up any CSE's in the near future. There is no added value, especially at the valuations that the current independents want.
Interesting to have been a fly on the wall at AOL to overhear their reaction since Bizrate powers Pinpoint Shopping (never heard of it? You are not alone). Given AOL's track record as a technology company I see them a a big loser here. they may decide to dump pinpoint (no big loss) and acquire another. Be an interesting change of pace for AOL to invest in growth industry for a change.
IAC is an intersting case. Pricegrabber powers AJ's comparsion shopping and Dealtime (shopping.com) powers iwin and other portals. Will they throw all those out to gobble up NexTag? Possibly. Diller would have a stranglehold on the lucrative mortgage market with Lendingtree, GetSmart and NexTag.
Pricegrabber is nice, but at the core you have tech goods, with recent forays in softgoods and services that have yet to pan out. They also don't have VCs screaming for an exit strategy so they are in no rush to sell on the cheap.
As for the valuations of these comapanies (Shopping.com/Dealtime and Shopzilla/Bizrate), based on projected 2006 earnings multiples they are not out of this world and besides they are throwing off cash something that was an alien concept back in 1999.
However most all of these players pray at the altar of Google/Goto-Overture-Yahoowhatever for their traffic and that can be their achilles heel in the future. Sure margins are pretty fat right now 20-30%, but what about 1-2 years down the road when all the large retailers get serious about their online ad campaigns?
Who's on the block?
NexTag and PriceGrabber
Who's a potential acquisiton/merger candidate?
IAC, Overstock (although Patrick would have to do some serious financial juggling to pull this off - not an all cash deal to be sure), Federated Department Stores (Dark Horse) and some others.
One final note, there are numerous wannabes: Pricescan, Pricewatch, Priceflo (I detect a pattern), Smarter, BrilliantShopper (powered by Shopping), SNAP, etc. What separates the big boys from the second tier players is their SEO and SEM skills pure and simple. That and domain spamming on the big search engines. Most of the growth these boys have seen over the past year has come in large part to building out/ramping up sister sites. Dealtime - Shopping.com, NexTag - Calibex, and Bizrate - Shopzilla. The more the merrier until Google/Yahoo! crack down.
Cheers!
However most all of these players pray at the altar of Google/Goto-Overture-Yahoowhatever for their traffic and that can be their achilles heel in the future. Sure margins are pretty fat right now 20-30%, but what about 1-2 years down the road when all the large retailers get serious about their online ad campaigns?
I agree with this. Larger retailers are increasingly entering the PPC arena. In general the shopping sites bid low and have lower positions. New entrants will push their positions down even further, reducing their traffic.
As its not entirely clear on their own site. Revenue comes in the form of affiliate sales or is it based purely on PPC?
Its mostly PPC ,with a minimum CPC of 15 cents in their site you can imagine the fat adword arbitrage oppurtunities! .
Will google really get 'wise' to Bizrate? and replace them on the serps? They seemed to replace some pretty spammy sites in the results, same with amazon pages.
But funny enough, I showed someone a bizrate page the other day and they thought it was spam! Ha. I'm also off to make some spam of my own.
What they did was bought the brand name 'pets.com'
There is no way they will earn they will earn over 1/2 billion dollars of profit to make up for what they spent.
You have players like Google, Yahoo and MSN all competing against them with Overture and Adsense in the general search engines.
I fail to see how they just didn't flush 1/2 billion down the toilet.
