THEDEAL.COM - Feb 12 - Lavalife is being shopped by its owner, online marketer Vertrue. Vertrue paid C$152.5M ($113.9M) to acquire Lavalife in 2004. Vertrue was itself bought out by management, private equity firms One Equity Partners and Brencourt Investors and venture capital firm Rho Ventures for $855M in 2007. Lavalife's Web properties have been on the block for about four months. Lavalife Voice, a phone-based dating service, is not being shopped. Some say the auction has been going on for longer than that. "They've wanted to sell for a while," Noel Biederman, CEO of Avid Life Media, said of Lavalife. "Lavalife is not of great strategic value, and its business is in decline," said Mark Brooks, an industry consultant with Courtland Brooks. The company has not disclosed revenues since it was taken private in 2007. That year it brought in ~$90M. Although online dating giants Avid Life and FriendFinder Networks canceled initial public offerings this month, the space is still ripe for M&A deals, according to Brooks.
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M&A is hot amazing how many investors and sites I've been pairing up lately. No comment on quoting your client's frustration over their failed IPO while simultaneously trashing the competition.
Posted by: Daveevans | Feb 25, 2010 at 11:38 AM
LOL. Not surprising in the least, men have to pay more and more get less and less. (Let's face it 95%-99% of the people who pay to initiate contact there are men.)
2004, sounds about right when it started it going downhill
Posted by: Tony | Feb 28, 2012 at 10:39 PM