Viacom-Atom: Sale Price & Synergy With iFilm

Mika Salmi and his team have been at this for a long time now…almost eight years. The founders and shareholders had been weighing for the last year or sowhether to go the IPO route or sell. Even though the sale price seems low, I think it is rational on both sides, and there are couple of factors contributing to it:
— The company had a lot of money pumped into it since the start (about $87 million in total), and had a very complicated shareholder structure, similar to another company Viacom bought: iFilm. (For more on Atom’s long list of investors, see this VC Rating blog post.)
— The company’s business is growing well, but badly needed a bigger platform, in wake of some very high profile competition from upstarts like YouTube on the video side, and all kinds of other new and established companies on the casual gaming side. So those probably kept the price in check.
It will be interesting to see how Viacom/MTVN now integrates Atom’s various properties. I have a feeling they might end up killing some side/new projects Atom went into, much as the two parties will deny it now. After all, iFilm is Atom’s direct competitor in a lot of ways. The two together fit well in terms of complementary audience, just not in terms of product line.
But between the two sites, Viacom now has a pair of excellent talents for this “multi-platform age”: Blair Harrison and Mika Salmi. Now if only Michael Wolf would leave them alone and not restructure them to oblivion.
You can track our coverage of Viacom in our dedicated archive.

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