News has been circulating over the weekend about the Yahoo! disposal of Kelkoo, and now some of the finer details are starting to seep through. Seems that Yahoo! got rid of their price comparison shopping site for around €100 million – quite a hit on the €475 million they paid for it in 2004 (but surely they made some profits from it in the meantime?). But why sell now? Bit of bad timing, no?
As the world lashes into this recession of ours, wouldn’t right now be a great time to ramp up the services offered by a price comparison site, to recruit new users, to find more ways of saving more people money – thus making more money for Kelkoo? From my own experience with Compare.ie, owning a price comparison site is rather an excellent idea – believe me!
Even Kelkoos’ affiliate programme was/is genius. Kelkoo charged merchants on a cost per click basis, and paid affiliates only on throughput clicks from Kelkoo that originated from the affiliate website.
Example: I visit affiliate website, click on a link to Kelkoo… but it’s only when I click on a link from Kelkoo to a merchants website that the affiliate gets paid. Affiliates were only paid for revenue they had been guaranteed to generate for Kelkoo. Legend – Kelkoo couldn’t have gone wrong with that one! Could they?
So why sell now? And why take such a hit on it?
Do remember that Myhome.ie, an Irish property website, was sold for €50 million around the same time as Kelkoo was bought by Yahoo!. Maybe this means that Myhome.ie is valued at under 1/4 of the value it was originally bought at too?
Food for thought, perhaps.
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