buyouts

Who's Gonna Buy Monster?

confonz · 05/04/07 12:03PM

CONFONZ — That damn Monster is still outside your house, peeking in the windows. Every once in a while, it knocks on the window and quietly suggests that you need a new job. Well, it seems as though that Monster's got its own window knockers, and they're carrying cash. Earlier this week, the dot com's stock price leapt up like frogs in a dynamite pond. All over rumors of an impending buyer. After the jump, we look at the most recent round of rumored ruffian buyers.
As if it weren't bad enough to work for a company's who's mascot has some strange trumpet-based nose, now the poor folks who run this fairly successful site have to worry that they're going to be snarfed up by the Tribune (Note the Favicon defaults to a Sun logo...) company, or worse yet McClatchy. Both of these newspaper companies are desperately poor, thanks to years of losing marketshare to Craigslist, of all places, and the mind boggles at just how, in fact, a company that's biggest paper is the Miami Herald could afford to buy such a successful startup.
Of course, the real sexy buyout rumor is, surprise! Google. Just imagine how excited all those vets working at Military.com will be when their shares get swapped for 10 times their current value! Of course, rumors of Google buying Monster are vastly overstated. In all actuality, it's far more likely that Gannett will end up the buyer. It's another newspaper company, but at least it already owns web properties, namely, Careerbuilder.com.

Behind the deal: JotSpot price rumored at $50 million

Nick Douglas · 11/01/06 01:48PM

Word is that Google paid $50 million when it recently bought JotSpot (a deal that was arranged over a month ago but was only announced yesterday). Word also is that JotSpot's technology is a piece of crap — which its competitors gleefully acknowledge, though in more appropriate terms. So why did Google dump that much money?

GoogTube aftermath: What is Blinkx, and do lawsuits have an economy of scale?

Nick Douglas · 10/11/06 07:17PM
  • The copyright issue: The top question after Google buys YouTube is, "Will media companies sue over pirated content?" If they do, Google is ready, thanks to its experience defending Google Book Search against publishers, keeping Google Video out of its own copyright suits, and years of fighting for the right to host image thumbnails and cached web pages.

Yahoo needs to buck up and make a big deal

Nick Douglas · 10/11/06 11:05AM

The New York Times takes a good look at Yahoo's woes today (even throwing in this shot of CEO Terry Semel looking like beleaguered Battlestar Galactica leader Colonel Adama), particularly its struggle to upgrade its advertising system and its inability to land a deal without Google swooping in.

Everyone must get sold

Nick Douglas · 10/10/06 08:33PM

CD-swapping site LaLa used some of its nine million bucks to buy an resurrect a dead Internet radio station, WOXY. Just when you thought a site already made obsolete by Amazon, eBay, and iTunes couldn't get any more irrelevant, ya know?

Loose Wires, GoogTube edition

Nick Douglas · 10/09/06 06:48PM
  • Googlewatcher John Battelle transcribes Google's conference call officially announcing the buyout. Revelations: Google Video will not go away and YouTube will still look like (and be called) YouTube. [Battelle's Search Blog]