It’s a not very well kept secret that InsiderPages is being shopped around. Now I hear that a sale is close or maybe done. Who will be the buyer?
- A newspaper or newspapers (looking for a YP property)?
- A yellow pages publisher (for the reviews)?
- A media company looking for a community site/local site?
What do you think?
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Here’s Sebastien Provencher’s interesting valuation analysis from his blog:
What it means: will be interesting to follow. I wonder how much they are looking for? Let’s try to calculate a napkin valuation. This San Francisco Chronicle article says they had 1M unique visitors per month in September. They had received a second $8.5M financing round a year ago for a total of $10M (which must have valued the company at $40-60M). Switchboard was bought by Infospace in 2004 for $160M, they had 5.5M searches per month then (but also $15M in revenues and $55M in cash). if you remove the cash position, Switchboard was bought for about $100M. InsiderPages must generate 2 searches per month per user, so 2M searches. Based on that transaction, InsiderPages would be worth $36M. From a unique visitor perspective, it means $36 per unique visitors, another good method of doing a quick evaluation. I think most of the transactions I’ve seen in the last few years were worth around $30 to $40 per unique visitor, another sanity check there. So, InsiderPages might be worth $30M to $40M currently.
Screenwerk 
February 15, 2007 at 3:50 pm
A yellow pages publisher I believe.
February 15, 2007 at 3:51 pm
A yellow pages publisher I believe. Maybe Idearc?
February 15, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Interesting. I did not know they were being shopped around. I did a quick valuation estimate on my blog.
February 15, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Gonna have to agree that (with how quickly the three have been ‘adopting’ local search and its tech), its likely a YP publisher.
Not sure if they would do it just for reviews – doesn’t JB have a similar amount, and just did a licensing deal with YP.com ?
February 15, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Yes re JB.
It will be interesting to see which “segment” buys it. Because that will impact whether it has a future and how it’s used.
February 15, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Wait – what about a company like Google/Yahoo buying it for the data? (I would imagine media company refers to someone like Viacom)
February 15, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Yahoo has more data than InsiderPages and Google gets it for free and from multiple sources (e.g., citysearch, Yelp, etc.). An AOL might be interested because they were heavy into local but their efforts have flagged of late. An InfoSpace would probably like it but I don’t think they’re in a position to make the acquisition right now.
Google wouldn’t pay more than about 15-20 (or so) million for the site.
Media company would be a Fox or a Viacom, yes.
February 15, 2007 at 11:36 pm
I’m talking about the search data history though – they would give whatever company bought them a great view on whats going on.
Google and Yahoo! all get their traffic to their local sites due to their brand. The data IP must have (of searches, visitors, etc) surely must have its own value to one of those search engines.
February 16, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Have to say that I am guessing the VCs will be happy to get their money back (and that is factoring in the cash balance of the firm).
My guess will be someone from left field like a rollup play (demand media et al) or someone like Internet Brands or even Infospace.