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Written on 23rd February 2009
1 COMMENT 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Whilst the US web investment environment seems to be taking a breather, European acquisitions and investments continue in full force.
Today will see Italian online media company GoAdv, owner of Excite Europe, announce their intent to acquire French owneed shopping guide network LeGuide.com for €50 million.
The company already holds 11.8 percent of LeGuide’s shares and 10.8 percent of voting rights. In a prospectus GoAdv have released, it said the future of the copany would be “a blend of Web 1.0 and 2.0” and would “take advantage of Excite’s strength”.
The word is however that LeGuide.com, which current have 100 staff and 10 million monthly uniques across their sites, are not best pleased.
“After first examination of this proposal, the supervisory board sees no complements between the business models, nor any synergies that this operation may bring.”
With regard to financials, GoAdv are offering half of the asking price in stock and half in cash which values LeGuide shares at €7.50 – apparently a 9.2 percent premium on LeGuide’s trading price one month prior to this offer being made.
via paidContent and Techcrunch
Written on 3rd December 2008
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Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Everything is for sale if you pay the right price, right? Well, not Digg according to Jay Adelson who spoke with BusinessWeek recently. Digg’s new focus lies on becoming profitable as soon as possible. That of course is the right thing to say if you want to be bought.
On the other hand; Digg has reportedly been shopping itself around for years and rumors regularly surfaced about an impending sale. That sale never materialized and it could just be that Digg is running out of potential buyers. With the current state of the economy it makes a lot of sense to focus on revenues instead of an exit. Because it is common sense AND makes you more interesting for potential buyers.
Here are some of the new features Digg wants to add to increase traffic and revenue:
- sell ads on its RSS feeds
- keep costs reasonable
- focus more on the top-line revenue
- increase engagement on the site (by introducing new features)
- make Digg more social
- a revamped version of its search engine to offer more relevant search advertisements.
- International expansion by acquiring local Digg clones
Jay mentions there is ”probably a list of 15 to 20 things we want to do” in the following year. All to increase user interaction and thereby pageviews and revenue.
According to
Businessweek, in September, Jay said it had tripled revenues over the last year. In 2009, Adelson expects “another tripling if not more.” Earlier this year, Adelson wanted to reach profitability within two years. Now, he says, “it will hopefully happen within a year”.
Written on 8th December 2007
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My guess is that 95% of all current businessplan mention Google at the first logical exit partner. It used to be Yahoo and Microsoft before that. But it seems that there is another company that is swimming in cash and looking for innovative companies to aqcuire: Apple.
“Apple can afford to spend a billion, or 2, to acquire your company”
With a cash reserve of up to $15 billion (Source: Fortune) they sure can afford to spend a couple of billion on your business. And you might say that they are a hardware company and are probably not interested in your little Web2.0 scheme. But Apple is so much bigger than just hardware these days. They are a hardware, software, telephony, music, ecommerce and multimedia company. One thing they aren’t yet is a search or social network company. But why not change that? iTunes was a Mac only product at first but then turned ‘PC’ after a year or so and is THE music player on Windows now.
What if Apple would acquire Facebook? They can afford it, in cash, and would suddenly become THE online social network player with the hippest offline social meeting places in the world: The Apple store.
Yep, it is time for Apple to start making some acquisitions in the Internet world. What will YOU sell to Apple in 2008?
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