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Kerching!

By: Roger Whitehead, Director, Office Futures
Published: 11th October 2006
Copyright Office Futures © 2006

Google Blogoscoped - The Acquisition Price Guide

Philipp Lenssen - 10 October 2006
Trying to put the recent Google/ YouTube deal in perspective, Tristan Louis put together a great overview on tech acquisitions of the last few years (I added a couple myself):

Company / Acquired by / Price
Skype / Ebay / $2.6 billion
YouTube / Google / $1.65 billion
5% investment in AOL / Google / $1 billion
MySpace / News Corp / $580 million
dMarc Broadcasting / Google / $102 million

These are the first few from a list of 26 takeovers, going back to Deja News, in February 2001. The original list is more informative but has fewer entries.

Tristan Louis' contention is that there is no revival of the wild market valuations of the 1990s' dot.com frenzy. I'm sure he's right but I can't see how he's deciding what deals to count as evidence. Both lists omit, for instance, Friends Reunited (bought by ITV for £120 million in December 2005), Shopping.com (bought by eBay for $620 million in August 2005) and PayPal (eBay, again, for $1.5 billion in July 2002). Do these deals support his argument or weaken it?