Three years after paying $225 million to buy online ad company Allyes, Chinese ad firm Focus Media is selling a majority stake in the company, which bills itself as China’s “largest online media service provider,” to PE firm Silver Lake. Silver Lake is paying $124 million...
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Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer is taking the stage at Microsoft’s analyst day to talk about the company’s consumer businesses, saying that “a lot of the issues we see in our consumer businesses are very much on the minds of the shareholders.”
That’s an understatement, considering that the lackluster state of Microsoft’s...
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Twitter’s latest move to keep users engaged on its site: a new tool that suggests other members users might want to follow “based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.” The launch comes as Twitter has taken other steps to make itself more accessible and interesting...
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Washington Post-owned Slate Group is closing down The Big Money, the business commentary spinoff it launched two years ago, saying the site wasn’t profitable. The belief when The Big Money launched in 2008 was that the financial crisis augered well for a business media site with Slate‘s...
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That Facebook IPO may be even further off than previously thought ... A report by Bloomberg cites insiders who say that the company may wait until 2012 for an IPO. The previous expected date was 2011, because two top investors had said in January that the IPO wouldn’t...
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Vertical marketing firm QuinStreet, which paid what was reportedly the highest price ever for a domain when it spent $16 million buying Insure.com and its related assets last fall, has followed up that deal by buying Insurance.com. No word on the price, but it’s likely that the noun...
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Will Facebook backer Digital Sky Technologies go public before Facebook? The Russian internet investment group, which has accumulated a five percent stake in the social network, has hired Goldman Sachs, along with two other investment firms, to explore an IPO next year, according to Read more »
Health Grades, the publicly-traded owner of popular doctor ratings site HealthGrades.com, is being taken private by PE firm Vestar Capital Partners in a $294 million deal. Vestar, which includes former WebMD (NSDQ: WBMD) CEO Roger Holstein among its partners, is paying $8.20 per share for Health Grades, a 29 percent...
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Zynga is confirming this evening that it has indeed raised $150 million in funding from Japanese internet and telecom firm Softbank. Reports that the social gaming giant had raised the cash first surfaced several months ago, although Zynga would not comment then.
Revenue at McClatchy (NYSE: MNI), the major newspaper publisher, keeps shrinking—but at a slower rate—as the ad market gets stronger. The company said revenue dropped 6.4 percent to $365.3 million during the quarter, an improvement from the 8.2 percent drop it had reported three months ago. Net income, however,...
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