Sentia Media acquires Australian social media monitoring service BuzzNumbers

Social media monitoring platform BuzzNumbers has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by Sentia Media, the two companies have announced today.

Since its founding in Sydney in 1982 as MediaMonitors, the recently rebranded Sentia Media has built one of the largest media intelligence businesses in the Asia-Pacific area. The BuzzNumbers acquisition serves to bolster the social media intelligence component of their offering as older firms recognize the growing importance of this sector as media.

BuzzNumbers mines social data and offers its users analysis and insight into trend sentiment on various networks and has done quite well out of it, with rapidly growing revenues, staff and clientele from 2010 to today. Australian readers may remember their showcase of the technology with the BuzzElection site that broke down social media coverage of the 2010 Federal election.

Given BuzzNumbers’ solid business model, it had the potential to join the many other Australian startups who see sustained growth as the goal rather than an exit. This is a byproduct of the risk aversion that sees most Australian founders avoid capital in favor of bootstrapping.

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While not an approach that gives rise to many Facebooks, it is one that delivers consistently profitable founder-owned job providers such as Envato and Campaign Monitor, and businesses that bootstrapped to profits and success before taking their first investment money, such as 99designs and Atlassian.

BuzzNumbers was founded by Nick Holmes à Court in 2007. Holmes à Court, who is a relative of one of Australia’s wealthiest women, Janet Holmes à Court, also serves as an advisor for Sydney-based startup incubator StartMate. Given this latest exit he is now much better positioned for the task of advising new founders, as one of the relatively few Australian tech founders who have seen an exit by acquisition.

Image Credit: gerlos