Reported over on sister blog AdViking today – blinkx has made an offer to buy Miva. The offer is $1.20 per share which is a hefty premium on the current stock price. In what is probably related news Miva’s co-founder Seb Bishop left Miva last week.
Miva, which is a combination of Findwhat (onetime 2nd tier US PPC network) and Espotting (one time 1st tier European PPC network), appears to have been on life support for a few years now. Findwhat paid a lot more than $41 Million for Espotting back in 2004. [Side note: I personally believe Espotting was one move away from being a $500 Million dollar mini-monster in Europe. I mean a smart move. But hey that's business and probably more interesting as part of short business lessons learned piece some day.]
I would guess this deal will go ahead… As an ex-insider from Espotting I can only hope this deal is good news for all the employees!
More analysis on the deal is available here on paidcontent, Screenwrek and SEW.
Update 11 Aug: I was thinking about this deal over the weekend, which I know is a bit sad. Anyway, I was trying to figure out why Blinkx would buy Miva? I am guessing they get a number of things: advertising people, a revenue stream, traffic to push Blinkx services down, tool bar & domain business which looks like the best piece of Miva and a host of advertising relationships. This last one is something a lot of online players miss, that it takes physical time to develop advertiser relationships and to build any ad network of size, this is probably the hardest part of the ad network business espacially one that covers the long tail and as well as the fat head. This also one Google’s strongest weapons. More on this meme another day.
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blinkx Make a Run at Miva « AdViking // 11 August 2008 at 10:21 am |
[...] a lot of people (like AdViking contributor and ex-eSpotter, A Fuller View on the Miva Blinkx Deal and Motley Fool’s Rick Aristotle Munarriz) who have been following the fall from great height [...]