For the longest time, I’ve been hinting at private equity firms to give me a call so we can rescue Yahoo! That might happen, it might not. But to pull that off, you need a good $40B or so. With Yahoo! at $25B - and reporting earnings as we speak - it might happen.
But today, an easier target. No, I’m not talking about CNET - though I’d love to manage CNET and whip it into shape, too. CNET is in fact facing a hostile takeover from Jana Partners, who has built up a 20% stake in the company.
I’m talking about About.com, the company founded by Scott Kurnit, first sold to Primedia for $690M, then unloaded to the New York Times for $410M in 2005.
Just this past Sunday, I mentioned that I was surprised at how little NYT had invested in developing the videos on About.com. I mentioned that with much lesser resources, we had built a video library twice the size of About.com.
Anyway, Alley Insider is now reporting that NYT wants to sell About.com :
It’s on track to do about $100 million in revenue for 2007, and perhaps $30 million in operating profit, up from $44 million and $11.7 million in 2005 (those numbers include results from recent acquisitions like ConsumerSearch–$33 million purchase price–and UCompareHealthCare.com, $2.3 million). At a 15x Ebitda multiple, About could fetch $450 million. Bump that up to 20x, and it looks a little better: $600 million.
I think About.com will have a hard time finding a buyer because big buyers won’t know what to do with it. With so much focus on social media and networking, an old school Web 1.0 company such as About.com won’t be able to command $500M from many obvious buyers because such companies would rather spend $500M on more high growth opportunities - basic risk and return.
So devoid of such upside, here’s my two not-so-subtle suggestion:
- Lend me $500M.
- We’ll buy About.com for $500M
- We’ll leverage our expertise and library at WatchMojo.com and invest some of that $30M in profits in developing About.com in a video content powerhouse to match its text content strength.
- We’ll integrate our MetaMojo.com vertical search technology to better develop and profit from niche vertical opportunities.
- We’ll let About.com’s columnists use the BloggerMojo.com blog network to publish timely pieces that drive traffic back to the millions of pages deep within About.com.
- We’ll use the StreetMojo.com application and create mini comminities matching users with marketers (b2c) and users with users (c2c).
Overnight - or in 1 quarter - About.com goes from a really useful but stagnant old, new media company, to a rapidly growing company with considerable exposure to both social media and video.
Adding our existing video content alone on About.com’s thousand of SEO-optimized pages alone would reap considerable strategic value. But with video advertising set to cross $1B in 2008 - and cross $7B in 2012 in the US alone - I am pretty sure that I can make About.com be a $10B market cap company in 5 years (7x growth in video market alone in 4 years).
Let’s face it, About.com can attempt to build up video alone etc., but within About.com, that will be hard. With About.com being a part of NYT, it’s impossible.
Something tells me that making a run at CNET is counter-productive. They don’t seem to be a willing, motivated seller. But NYT Company? I think they’d sell that puppy to me in a heartbeat.
Now all I need is a banker. A private banker with $500,000,000.00. Hmm. Where can I find that?
Any takers?
Related:
- Top 10 Web M&A Deals
- If I had a billion dollars
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