Mediabistro.com, which began as a social network with bare bones
technology and grew to a profitable, must-visit site for media
professionals, is being acquired by Jupitermedia , the
parent company of this Web site, in a cash deal worth $23 million.
Jupitermedia said the deal includes $20 million in cash and a two year
earn-out that could result in an additional $3 million in cash
consideration. Funding for the deal was secured through the recently
announced closing of a $115 million senior credit facility arranged by
KeyBanc Capital Markets.
Laurel Touby started Mediabistro.com in 1999 as an online community for
media professionals. The site’s cocktail mixers for media and creative pros
became a popular forum for job-seekers and media professionals to network.
It has since grown to include job postings, educational courses, events,
forums, original content and a premium subscription service.
In a statement, Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia said: “We are very
excited to add Mediabistro and their community of members to Jupitermedia.
Mediabistro.com is run by a top-notch team, led by founder Laurel Touby.
This team has nurtured a very loyal following of media and creative
professionals that relies on Mediabistro to find jobs, learn about the
latest industry happenings and best practices, and bring them together at
live community-driven events around the country.”
The site will provide the JupiterOnlineMedia division with another
diversified and fast growing revenue stream through its vertical online job
board, Meckler added.
“The Mediabistro job board should benefit from the
vast traffic generated from our online media and Jupiterimages properties.
Furthermore, Mediabistro has a wide variety of original content and blogs,
which will augment our 150 original content sites. And, Mediabistro events
mesh nicely with Jupitermedia’s growing trade show and Webinar operations.”
In a note on the Mediabistro.com
site today, Touby wrote: “Today is probably the happiest day of my life.
(Okay, second happiest. Getting married to Jon was pretty excellent.) When I
put up my first web site in 1996 — or was it 1997? the records are gone —
it was a humble little directory on someone else’s web site. Not even a site
of its own. There was no hope of a business plan, much less a profitable
business. The entire reason for its existence was to help media people,
myself included, meet up, hook up and share resources with one another — a
social network with bare bones technology.”
Some ten years later, she added, the site boasts “the largest community
of media pros — from magazine editors to TV news anchors to marketing
people to ad agency execs — reading our daily news, flashing onto our
blogs, posting job ads, replying to job ads, attending seminars and events
and generally making merry with mediabistro.com’s many offerings.”
