Yahoo has acquired college sports site Rivals.com, says the Associated Press in a story that may have been accidentally published early. The price is not being disclosed, although the rumor is that the deal was closed for around $100 million. Rumors of talks first surfaced in April.
We previously reported on Terry’s involvement in securities fraud and were subsequently threatened with a lawsuit based on that post (the threats were later dropped). Yahoo obviously got comfortable with Terry’s questionable past and his hardball tactics towards anyone writing about that past.
Rivals competitor Scout.com was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in August 2005 for around $60 million.
Rivals looks like a sweet site, hopefully Yahoo can bring in a decent designer.
5x annual revenue. Not bad. Wonder what kind of growth rival’s seeing these days.
Yah like always I got to say ” Show me the Money ” if Semel scooped 71 million and not like the CIA anonymous tipster said Really only ( 8 Million ) I would estimate if Yahoo could scrap together 1 million in these trying times it would go to paying their light bill. I am not talking kanoodle here. Hardy Har Har
Seems to me a good thing for Yahoo!, much better than the rumored MySpace acquisition.
i wish someone would say “crime doesn’t pay” to Shannon Terry and photograph his reaction. That said, if you’re the kind of person that likes to watch the NFL draft (and the week the NFL draft was on it was just barely edged out by the Sopranos as the #1 cable show for that week, so the audience is nothing to sneeze at), Rivals.com looks like a great resource.
wow yahoo is buying everything now. i heard yahoo wants to buy a 25% stake in myspace.
I guess Rivals founder got happy with yahoo’s $100 million dollar, and decide not to bother mike arrington. That’s very very very selfish behavior.
I like to say Shannon Terry… “Do whatever you want with cool $100 million dollars.” and don’t bother Techcrunch readers.
There are some techcrunch readers here don’t like rivals.com. They got jeolous.
P.S. Good luck with million dollar and don’t give your feedback on this post.
That was dumbest deal. yahoo could’ve brought ESPN college sport page.
If you were startup and do business like that… The investors at wall street wouldn’t be impress with that deal. You won’t see rivals.com brand on TV… Baseball, basketball, NASCAR, boxing…
ESPN got best sports brand. :) To ESPN — Keep up good!!
Their site is down. Maybe they could use the money to buy some more servers.
Can we move next topic. I hope there is another technology that can cheer us up.
I think there is more traffic than usual to the site. Will check it when its up again.
Mark and Wes, you are both full of it. The site is up and running fine and has been all night.
I still cant access the site Bart. I get the error: Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at http://www.rivals.com. Maybe the problem is on my end.
yeahh..me too..I still cannot access rivals.com..
Too much risk bet. $100 million dollar is lot of money to give away.
yahoo could fall for $ 4.00 a shares I think…. Maybe 10-30 years. :(
Try Alexa data
on chart type Rivals.com versus Techcrunch.com.
I am in China and i can not access to rivals.com too~!I thought it was banned by GFW(wtf?even a sports site could be banned………………..crap,i despise those cock-block-minded GFW mother fuckers)Now i must say i was wrong.hahahaha
commenting after reading post title only:
WOW only 100 million for google and microsoft! What a steal
100 million dallars for “that” site ! You’re kidding right? I’m in the wrong business :(
Yahoo has got it wrong check out Google http://www.webguild.org, he power they are amassing. Get $200 off using this code “crunch” from this link http://www.webg...ser/myspace.php.
100 Million; way too much for yahoo to be buying this weak company.
Well yahoo might have actually got things right this timje. They’ve bought something that actually has revenue according to the info stated above. Plus they’ll save tons of cash in the tech backend. The content is good and very focused which helps in the old ad sale department. Not a bad deal if all the numbers are correct.
Another example of Web consolidation and winner-take-all markets.
The Net is not purely competitive markets!
I don’t know – this is all starting to sound reminiscent of the DOT.com bubble burst time. Instead of investors, it’s now online companies gobbling up everything with no real picture of how to make it all work together or profit from it?
It’s more of a race to see who can acquire more…..
I pesonally worked for a short while at Rivals.com and continue to stay in touch with several people who both own and work or worked at Rivals while I was there. I would vouch for just about everyone there including Shannon.
Rivals.com was a debt free company and is growing at a incredibly fast rate. Their e-commerce division will be the fastest growing segment in the coming years. The subsciptions and revenue model is spotless.
That being said I have to say that I think Rivals.com was worth far more than 100 million. Yahoo signed a great deal and will profit very quickly from the current cashflow and growth ahead. I understand why they sold but I think they had better options available.