Comments on: Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million

By: Led

Led — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:42:22 +0000

Looks like Demand Media is not joking around.

By: 2008 Year End Acquisitions Post » The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

2008 Year End Acquisitions Post » The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:27:24 +0000

[...] a social media software company. Its two main products are SiteLife and BlogBurst. Press Release | TechCrunch | [...]

By: perde

perde — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:49:55 +0000

good

By: Profit from buying small websites | After Beta

Profit from buying small websites | After Beta — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:04:00 +0000

[...] websites generally have been valued at anywhere from 3X to 10X annual revenues. Take the recent acquisition of Pluck, for instance. Pluck’s reported revenues were $10M a year and the company was sold in March [...]

By: Sequoia Capital Gets Serious About Fantasy | GooHoo Social News

Sequoia Capital Gets Serious About Fantasy | GooHoo Social News — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:53:08 +0000

[...] Games’ founder and CEO Andrew Busey was the co-founder of Pluck, which Demand Media bought in March for $75 [...]

By: Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes | t7000

Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes | t7000 — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:08:40 +0000

[...] recently started to move over to Pluck’s social network product. Demand bought Pluck for a rumored $75 million earlier this [...]

By: IS2B » Blog Archive » Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:53:46 +0000

[...] recently started to move over to Pluck’s social network product. Demand bought Pluck for a rumored $75 million earlier this [...]

By: Infotron » Blog Archive » Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:59:47 +0000

[...] recently started to move over to Pluck’s social network product. Demand bought Pluck for a rumored $75 million earlier this [...]

By: Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes

Yahoo Takes A Gander At Demand Media To Plug Some Holes — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:56:23 +0000

[...] recently started to move over to Pluck’s social network product. Demand bought Pluck for a rumored $75 million earlier this [...]

By: List of Q1 2008 Web/Internet/Technology Acquisitions » The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:02:41 +0000

[...] a social media software company. Its two main products are SiteLife and BlogBurst. Press Release | TechCrunch | [...]

By: Pluck, three years later. . . : Texas Startup Blog

Pluck, three years later. . . : Texas Startup Blog — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:10:24 +0000

[...] Techcrunch is reporting Demand Media bought Austin-based Pluck for $75MM cash. Frankly, I am fairly surprised. I first wrote about Pluck after sitting on a panel at the McCombs School of Business (UT @ Austin) Web 2.0 Panel in 2005. I compared VC-backed Pluck to bootstrapped Consumating, suggesting that to be considered a success Pluck would need to be sold for $100MM versus a $1-10MM sale for Consumating. My thesis was that Pluck was using a Web 1.0 funding style to build a Web 2.0 business and it was very likely that the founders would see little, if any, upside when and if the company was sold. Consumating, on the other hand, was a classic example of a Web 2.0 funding method coupled with a Web 2.0 business model providing the founders with a very nice upside. [...]

By: Guinevere

Guinevere — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:43:30 +0000

Ugh, they paid too much. I use Pluck at work and it’s a major disappointment.

By: Confused

Confused — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:46:09 +0000

Um why isn’t somebody paying me millions to install large corporate forums? Can’t be THAT hard….

By: SK

SK — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:31:36 +0000

Demand Media looks like a bit of Marchex and a couple others – aggregate a bunch of fair to middling domain names, put just enough content around them to make them SEO relevant, add some community features (Pluck), run some google ads on the site and you have a high margin, near zero cost website. Repeat 200 times across different genres. Print money. Works for a handful of guys in a garage, but for a company that’s raised $320MM???

By: Marco

Marco — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:15:11 +0000

@Thom: Pluck makes money by selling licenses for their platform of community tools to newspapers.

Newspapers pay Pluck to add features like community comments, citizen blogs, community photo uploads, etc. Pluck runs the infrastructure, the newspaper gets more pageviews.

I think it’s all based on Javascript widgets with, I’m guessing, a nice backend for administration and lots of rules that help newspapers overcome the fear of allowing the general public to post on their site.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:52:41 +0000

Look, Pluck has been around for a while now. They went to market with an RSS reader, and it wasn’t a big hit. Then Shadows, which was a clever idea, but it didn’t really hit either. So they see an opportunity to provide large publishers like Hearst and The Guardian with some social media-type functionality, and they start to get some traction. But it’s not necessarily revolutionary. So why not sell into that strength? Probably a good time to exit after selling to many of the top media companies, because the only way to continue the growth rate is to move down to medium sized media companies, which requires a larger sales force for a lower average price point.

Of course AV didn’t invest in this company hoping for a 3x return, but they know enough to make hay when the sun shines.

By: DAVIDONE » Blog Archive » Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million

DAVIDONE » Blog Archive » Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:57:49 +0000

[...] Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations. The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range. Update: We’ve confirmed the number from an inside source – $75 […] (Read on Source) [...]

By: jenkins

jenkins — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:59:51 +0000

What in the world is Demand Media? It’s like the worst frankenstein monster i’ve ever seen. I’ve been in this industry for a long time but am not prepared for this beast.

By: Gus W.

Gus W. — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:10:03 +0000

Maybe not what they were hoping for when they wrote the checks but certainly more then they expected everyday after that…

By: Fabian Schonholz

Fabian Schonholz — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:39:14 +0000

I totally understand why investors would not be happy; but better 7x than 0x. Congrats to Pluck.

By: jason

jason — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:19:49 +0000

actually I think pluck had raised quite a bit more than 10mm, I like it was around 17-20. Reuerts invested over 7 and they had at least 10 prior to that,

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:15:49 +0000

Rosenblatt said he wanted to take it public in 2007. So I guess that's pushed to 2009.

By: sd

sd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:14:53 +0000

Erick, do you know where pluck’s revenue coming from?
and how does demand media make $$?

By: Thom

Thom — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:09:45 +0000

Am I missing something? Compete.com says Pluck has 14,000 uniques per month. How did they make $10M in revenues last year?

By: Javier

Javier — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:50:22 +0000

Not a home run, but I doubt the investors view this as one that “didn’t live up to expectations.” Based on revenue and growth rate, they were performing well. Looks like they were just in a situation where they had to choose between taking the moderate win or making a risky bet that they could enter new markets and grow it into a much bigger company. Given that they’d been around for a while, the team probably wasn’t up for attacking the bigger challenge.