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Comment by dirtyaura | Hacker News Reader

50% is quite standard for team acquisitions to my knowledge. However, for TechCrunch earn-out sounds quite high.

I'm also surprised of the price, it seems low compared to many tech acquisitions. TechCrunch has a lot of eyeballs, even if it doesn't have main stream audience.

Midsize Finnish regional newspaper companies have market caps around €180M. TechCrunch, a major international tech publication with millions of readers, is worth of only 10-25% of a local newspaper with audience of 300000 people? WTF? Either newspaper valuations are absurd, or internet advertising and tech events are a failure as a business model.

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It's a lot harder to get ads for an international media. I'd guess most of the ads on www.techcrunch.com are payed by US marketing budgets. The people who manage those only care about US viewers. So question N:1 is how many US viewers, without ad blockers the site has. N:2 - for how long is it gone keep them.

A regional Finnish newspaper is very likely to keep it's audience in one form or another for a long time. That audience has high purchase power and is less likely to go online and research cheaper alternatives to advertised products/services.

A regional Finnish newspaper is very likely to keep it's audience in one form or another for a long time

That's the gist I think. TechCrunch is making $10M revenue in a year (http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-is-close-to-buying-techcr...). It's hard to say how much of that remains as a profit, but I would expect that with AOL helping with ad sales and infrastructure, they can bring costs down considerably. Let's say $5M in profits.

It's a competitive market and there is not yet enough experience how long web properties can retain their audience, thus valuation of future revenues drop quickly.

Now, it seems that if AOL doesn't expect significant growth for TechCrunch, $25-50M is in a right ballpark.

However, I still think that $180M for a regional Finnish newspaper with 300K audience is a risky bet. Time to read their financials to understand this.

Note that there are also:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/ (Europe, UK-based)

http://fr.techcrunch.com/ (France)

http://jp.techcrunch.com/ (Japan)

What is the ticket tape symbol for that Finnish newspaper company?

They might have other sources of income/stability than just the papers. Maybe they are highly integrated(vertically and/or horizontally).

As others have noted, your first premise that the valuation is absurd sounds more likely without knowing more facts about that Finnish company.

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