Back in the day AT&T was the place where most cool but failed technologies ended up. Go Computing? Then it was AOL, which become the favorite bank to tap for Internet products that were on their way down. Looks like NBC is the new retirement home for the web properties with dubious record of success. The news of NBC buying Tribe.com, first reported by ValleyWag, and confirmed today by Paid Content lets me to believe that is the case.
NBC, which spent close to $600 million buying up iVillage hasn’t really been all that successful on the Internet. They did a search engine (and I don’t even remember its name), got into ecommerce and well they are still nowhere. Now they want to get on to the social networking bandwagon. Yeah - like that’s going to work!
9 comments so far
9:31 AM PT
That was a strange one, NBC linked up with Xoom.com and Snap to create NBCi. Chris Kitze led the thing… seems like so long ago now.
10:57 AM PT
yeah - that’s the upside of being old and have a recall. somethings don’t make sense - like they didn’t a few years ago.
11:14 AM PT
I believe their search engine was snap.com?
cheers, JH
12:05 PM PT
so with the hands of big business increasingly tightening on internet fun. what will be the next big thing? social networking is dead. corporate greed killed it.
12:13 PM PT
Om, have you heard any confirmation regarding the size of the deal? Rafat believes that the deal is for $50M, or less. That is not that large of an acquisition considering that they supposedly did a Series B round in Q1 ‘06 for 11M.
I don’t know what their pre-money valuation was, but I would assume that they did not want to sell off more than 30-40% to investors during the raise. If that is the case, then their ballpark pre-money was something like 30-40M. That means that their post money valuation was around 50Mish.
The net of this is that a sale of $50M today implies that they have created zero value since February. That is not exactly a sweet deal for their Series B investors. I would love to know more.
5:33 PM PT
what will be the next big thing? social networking is dead. corporate greed killed it.
Posted by jim on Jul 7th, 2006 at 12:05 PM -
#
give me a break! social networks are dead? myspace has 70 million members. if you add the top 10 sn sites together, it’s over 150 million members. yeah, keep believing you know what you’re talking about.
6:45 PM PT
myspace has 70 million members. if you add the top 10 sn sites together, it’s over 150 million members.
#
Not to pick nits, but I doubt the users are mutually exclusive I think the exact opposite is probably the case. Regardless, I just added nothing useful to this discourse :)
11:07 AM PT
Lets not forget that a good 30 to 40% of myspace accounts are fake.
8:38 AM PT
for just 200,000 members i guess $5mill max is a good deal for them, hey i am selling my file storage with 30k members for $500k, hehe
Leave a Comment