Ten Worst Internet Acquisitions Ever

As the market for acquiring fledgling Internet companies heats up, it's worth taking a look at all those acquisitions that didn't quite work out. For every Internet acquisition that's successful there seems to be dozens that die on the vine.

So what makes for a really bad Internet acquisition? First, it has to be expensive. No one's going to rake a company over the coals over a few blown $50 million acquisitions. That might sound like a lot of money to you and me, but that's a rounding error to Google.

Second, for an acquisition to be lousy it has to contribute little or no long term growth to the acquiring company. An acquisition that doesn't fit with a company's long term strategy and that is quickly forgotten - that's a bad buy.

So, here is my highly subjective list of the 10 worst Internet acquisitions of all time:

10. Hotmail - acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in 1998 for about $400 million. Hotmail was a second-tier free email service when Microsoft bought it and the acquisition did little to improve Microsoft's internet portal ambitions.

9. Skype - acquired by eBay (EBAY) in September 2005 for $2.6 billion. While it's early to call this one an absolute dud, eBay does not seem to have a plan - or at least a plan that would justify the acquisition price - for how to integrate Skype's calling service with the core auction business.

8. MySimon - acquired by CNET (CNET) in 1999 for $700 million. The price comparison site mySimon was supposed to launch CNET into lots of non-tech verticals - not a bad idea at the time. Unfortunately CNET had no idea how to effectively integrate mySimon and it's now withering away, surpassed by newer, shinier price comparison engines.

7. BlueMountain.com - acquired by Excite@Home in 1999. $780 million for an online greeting card site. 'Nuff said.

6. Lycos - acquired by Terra Networks for $4.6 billion in 2000. Yeah, I never heard of Terra either. The warning bells should have gone off when the deal was originally announced in May 2000 at a value of $12.5 billion, only to fall by more than 50% by the time it closed in October of that year because each company's stock price was plummeting.

5. Netscape - acquired by AOL (TWX) in 1998 for $4.2 billion. To be fair, this was a mercy acquisition. By the time AOL bought the company, Netscape had been humbled by Microsoft's free Internet Explorer browser. AOL clearly had no plans for Netscape and as a result the once pioneering company is now an afterthought.

4. GeoCities - acquired by Yahoo! (YHOO) in 1999 for $3.56 billion. When was the last time you visited a site with a geocities.com domain? I can't remember either. Shortly after the acquisition, innovation on GeoCities appears to have ground to a halt. GeoCities could have been MySpace, but the entire social networking revolution passed them right by.

3. Excite - acquired by @Home in 1999 for $6.7 billion. Remember Excite.com? Remember how it was the #2 or 3 portal for awhile? Well, a whole year and a half after the cable company @Home acquired Excite (for $394 per user!) in January 1999, the combined entity filed for bankruptcy never to be heard from again. Classically disastrous.

2. AOL - merged with TimeWarner in 2000. This one is obvious. While Time Warner finally seems to be turning things around at AOL six years after the fact, this merger was doomed from the start. Shortly after the merger AOL's business started falling apart fast, with TimeWarner holding the bag. There was never a coherent integration plan and all that talk of synergy is - thankfully - dead and gone.

1. Broadcast.com - acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $5 billion. Yahoo! paid a mind-boggling $710 per user back in the hey day of the bubble. But why does this rank higher than the AOL boondoggle? Two words: Mark Cuban. Yahoo's ludicrous overpayment for Broadcast.com gave Cuban the money to go out and buy the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and permanently implant himself on the American psyche. Unforgivable.

So did I miss any duds?

Next up: the 10 best Internet acquisitions. That'll be a littler harder.

Comments

[Anubhav:]

While I realize that these acquisitions are not worthwhile but aren't there hundreds of acquisitions happening in the non internet world which have been disasters as well. Also interestingly 9/10 of these acquisitions have happened in the pre dot.com burst era. Post that I can see that just one deal, that of Skype by e-bay has really been a misalligned move, but never know in auctions world C2C interactions might have negotiations where Skype might fit in.

2008 Aug 21 09:00 PM

[mike@packar...:]

Determining the right fit, deal structure, finance, due diligence and integration, & knowing where the rocks are makes the difference between wasted assets and effort and a well planned and executed transaction.

Most of the acquisition teams I’ve interviewed have tons of experience making and closing deals. Each team member has skills in their own area of expertise.

Success requires a team with just the right talents for each step of the process. My experience has been that teams lack meaningful process and tools. Too often, methods are haphazard and results come from frustration and guesswork rather than measurement and planning.

No matter how bright the team is, the complexity of the process and the overwhelming amounts of information necessary to find and complete transactions with well chosen candidates simply keeps the failure rate high (about fifty percent of acquisitions destroy value).

Brokers and lead generating contacts provide brokered deals on a transaction based fee basis. It is not the ideal way to be introduced to candidates.

Here are a few steps to make your next acquisition add and not destroy value.

1) Build a measurable criteria exercise as a critical first step. Every company goes through it in some fashion. Few make it a measurable tool for evaluation. It is not that hard once the definitions are numerically rated to give a ranking score to candidates.

2) Learn how to bring candidates into the fold. Without the ability to contact the larger share of available well chosen candidates (database management and contact savvy), there is just too much left undone to be a representative sampling of the available market. How targets are contacted and what they are told has a great impact on the results you obtain (the quality and quantity of your candidate base).

3) Spreadsheet hell. There are many bad ways to manage the profiling and research results from ten or more candidates. Information needs to be updated regularly. This becomes a big problem if spreadsheets or paper are used. An web tools are worth the investment to have access to current information (it makes information useful).

Unmanageable information is useless. Decisions will be made without the most important information if systems are not in place to make it readily available.

4) Be well counseled for deal structure and finance. The markets at this time especially are hard to read. It is worth the investment to know what current market conditions (valuations/finance) are and not make decisions based on guesswork.

5) Plan for due diligence, integration, and its attendant problems. There are many good companies, software, and process people to help with due diligence and transition.

Attending to the non financial aspects of due diligence and integration pays big dividends.

Mike@packardacquisions...

Jan 19 01:25 PM