(Light blogging this week due to travel.) Sony Pictures Entertainment is buying online video sharing site Grouper for $65 million, a deal only officially announced this morning and the smart bloggers are already debating whether Sony overpaid. Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch says the acquisition is out of whack compared to other recent online video site deals, noting that Viacom’s acquisitions of iFilm and Atom/Shockwave put a per unique visitor valuation on those purchases of $15 to $20, while Grouper, which, according to Comscore had 520,000 unique visitors in July, is costing Sony $70 to $120.
But for Sony, the value of Grouper is not in the traffic monetization and Rafat comes closer to the truth when he says “valuation is not really based on traffic.” Moreover, as he points out, Grouper lays claim to around eight million visitors per month.
Whatever the traffic count, Grouper represents far more to Sony than just the eyeballs it generates. Grouper gives Sony an already built online presence with a top technical and management team, a plug-and-play video distribution outlet that is ready to go now and would take years and millions of dollars for Sony itself to recreate.
It’s speed-to-market that Sony gets with this deal. Sony is an electronics and entertainment giant that so far hasn’t pulled together its vast product reach into one portal and Grouper gives the company instant access to the hot online video market while providing a test-bed for integration of electronic devices. As Grouper CEO and co founder Josh Felser says in the announcement “We have an opportunity, as part of the Sony family, to bring together user-generated and copyrighted content across platforms and devices for the first time.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 6:56 AM|Comments(0)
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