Highway Robbery at Careerbuilder
Greg Sterling reports on the transaction involving McClatchey and Gannett and Tribune that sees the later two upping their stake in Careerbuilder, Topix and Shoplocal at the expense of the former.
As Greg points out, the valuations were:
“The agreement values CareerBuilder at $1.55 billion, ShopLocal.com at $85 million and Topix.net at $72 million.”
Forget about Shoplocal and Topix and let’s go straight to my favorite no-one-gives-a-shit-about-but-it’s-one-of-the-jewels-of-the-Internet company, Careerbuilder.
As some context, Monster is currently worth $5bn, and besides Google has been the most impressive Internet stock of the past few years. Now consider they are losing ground to Careerbuilder, such that they are basically number two now.
Not only that, but Careerbuilder will conservatively do about $700-800m in revenue this year, which is about 50% more than it did in 2005.
Tribune and Gannett are raising their stake in one of the fastest growing Internet companies, that is so well strategically placed in amongst all that dead paper, for two times revenue. TWO TIMES REVENUE! Profits aren’t disclosed but the company would have to be throwing off shitloads of cash.
Forget about comparisons to Internet dead-weights like MSN and AOL, the company is growing faster than Yahoo is! TWO TIMES REVENUE PEOPLE!
Honestly, it is absolutely mind boggling that McClatchey could have made such a strategic mis-step.
[...] Jupiter analyst Niki Scevak, in a toughly worded, “R†rated post entitled “Highway Robbery at CareerBuilder,†calls CareerBuilder one of the underappreciated jewels of the Internet. He argues that “it is absolutely mind boggling that McClatchy could have made such a strategic mis-step.†[...]