Is WAYN on the block again?
March 18 Mike Butcher
Back in January I had several very good leads telling me that WAYN, the social network for travelers was in talks with AOL about a $200m sale. A term sheet was said to be imminent. I called WAYN but they denied the whole thing and, via another channel, I heard they were a little put out by my ‘rumour-mongering’, as they saw it.
In hindsight I must have been both premature, and also slightly off target - it turned out that AOL was in talks to buy a company which WAYN’s VC investor DFJ Esprit was involved in. BUt it wasn’t WAYN. It was their stable-mate, buy.at, a sale which duly happened, for around $150 million, in February.
Oh well, I thought, you win some, you lose some.
But now it appears WAYN is happy for the sale rumours to float once again, according to The Guardian. Perhaps especially now Bebo has been picked up by, you guessed it, AOL - the dumb-money exit for startups and “the place where innovation goes to die“.
According to reports, WAYN has fended off several approaches and AOL is meant to have been one “interested” party. As the Guardan says, there is indeed a certain whiff of opportunistic PR around the story. But hey, who can blame them? They may as well ride the Bebo wave, right? The price being floated this time round is £100m, or around $200m. Hmmnn, sounds familiar…
But The Guardian values them at closer to £58m based on comScore’s 3.1m unique users per month and 340,000 active monthly unique users in the UK. Oh dear.
At any rate, WAYN founders Peter Ward and Jerome Touze should get a better reception from Silicon Valley than us cynical British hacks when they fly over there for the government-backed Web Mission project in April. I’ll be tagging along as part of the press pack, and will see if I can’t tempt them into giving me the story over a beer or two. And I’ll be noting if they skip off to a meeting with AOL…
Comments
March 18th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
And apparently Wayn are denying it all over again.
I do wonder how much traction Wayn has now that Facebook is offering so much functionality to travellers. If I owned Wayn I would sell asap to capitalise on it’s success to date before other services eclipse it.
March 18th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
There is still plenty of mileage left in WAYN but you’ve got to sell when the time is right. Not sure about the fit with a travel company given their demographics. Maybe ITV will have another pitch into the social networking space (better luck second time and all that).
I’m still betting they won’t sell any time soon.
March 18th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Yes yes - but what are their REVENUES? And their EBITDA? Let’s get proper financial justification for valuations. if I’m buying a business, won’t go any further than 10x EBITDA - whatever the scaleable opportunity.
March 20th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I’m surprised WAYN has any traction at all considering the blatant spam tactics they use. Would any company with enough cash to buy a site for £50m+ really be interested in one that has such a shady marketing strategy?
March 21st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I think the numbers mentioned in this article seem off the mark - from doing a bit more research on this, I found WAYN uses Nielsen to track their numbers - there was in fact a story on some of their latest numbers being nearer the 6-7m uniques per month as opposed to the 3m reported here. As far as I know, Comscore based on Panel only and not always accurate. As for a comment on marketing strategy, I think this is a bit off topic - Gerry. Am personally getting 40 emails a day from hi5 and Facebook. If you dont like them, click opt out or dont join a SNS - As for Revenues and EBIDTA, i believe last.fm sold for $280m revenue…for a company making something like 4m euros sales - just to put things back into perspective. Back to bubble days? who knows