On January 20, 2011, Match acquired OkCupid for $50.0 million in cash, plus potential additional consideration that is contingent upon OkCupid’s 2011 earnings performance. The amount of the additional contingent consideration ranges from $0 to $40.0 million.
http://ir.iac.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1047469-11-4675
So that works out to 100 times+ ebitda if the max earn out is earned?
Match.com also announced the acquistion of meetic for around $500M. Meetic’s ebitda is around $60M a year so that is a dramatically different.
The real reason Match bought okcupid is a couple minutes into this talk by the CEO.
http://ir.iac.com/eventDetail.cfm?EventID=97073
1. Badoo a free dating site supposidly is earning north of 140M now. They have no advertising costs so I assume their ebidta is higher than all of Match.com current properties combined. They currently plan to IPO for 2 Billion.
2. In the talk the Okcupid team signed a deal to stay on for a year and is focused building a badoo clone that will get profiles via facebook to compete in the space.
From the sounds of it Okcupid is going to have no more investment in it and left to die off like singlesnet.com, the focus seems to be to focus on dominating all these new forms of “online dating” such as mobile.
Badoo has grown 40% in the US dating market in the last 2 weeks, Match.com’s traffic has declined 30% in the last 30 days according to hitwise.
