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June 6, 2005
Shopzilla to be acquired for $525M
According to an article in Reuters today,
the E. W. Scripps Co., which owns newspapers, broadcast and cable TV networks, said it will pay $525 million in cash for 100 percent of Shopzilla, one of the leading pure-play shopping search engines (formerly known as Bizrate).
The article offers this rationale for the deal:
The Internet is shaking up the once-staid and lucrative business of classified advertising. Newspaper publishers that once enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the classified market now face increasing competition from Web sites like eBay.
This comes just days after Ebay agreed to buy Shopping.com. I think the eBay/Shopping.com deal seems to be more strategic, because eBay was already in the business of helping users comparison shop for products. But I do agree that the decline of the newspaper classified advertising business is driving major activity by all the papers. Following on these lines, I expect there will be a string of acquisitions of vertical search engines, particularly those related to classifieds, within the next year. The next one I would predict: Oodle, a classified search engine that aggregates across many sources of classified ads and provides a nice faceted search interface.
Posted by barney at June 6, 2005 3:56 pm
This entry was posted in Digital Media, Ecommerce, Search
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