AOL Sells Buy.at to UK Network Digital Window for $17.0 Million



2010 March, 2nd
Mihaela Lica
Mihaela Lica
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With this new addition to its affiliate marketing network, Digital Window creates UK’s largest performance-based marketing group. The acquisition was announced yesterday by Affiliate Network, a branch of Digital Window. The amount paid for Perfiliate Ltd. (the founders of Buy.at) remained undisclosed. Buy.at was previously part of AOL, and it served customers from Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK and US.

When AOL bought Buy.at back in 2008 some sources valuated the sale at about $150 million USD. We can only guess the value of the network two years later, and taking into consideration the current global financial realities, we do not expect high numbers. As a matter of fact, on an official AOL document, the value of the sale is estimated at $17.0 million in cash (give or take):

On February 26, 2010, we completed the sale of Perfiliate Limited (doing business as buy.at) to Digital Window Limited for approximately $17.0 million in cash (subject to working capital adjustments). We expect to record a pre-tax loss on this sale of approximately $15 to 20 million, based on the cash proceeds and the carrying value of the net assets sold (including goodwill allocated to the sale). The results of operations of buy.at were not material to our consolidated financial statements.

Buy.at was not a profitable property under AOL, so AOL decided to sell. Pure speculation would point that Buy.at was not profitable enough for AOL (which separated from Time Warner Inc. last year) – but will be profitable for Digital Window, a company based in the same country as Perfiliate Ltd. and a company that, according to the press release, has many other niche related innovations combined under the same network (ShopWindow, Offer Central, Darwin and EventEngine).

Digital Window is more familiar with the European/Scandinavian market, as it is co-owned by German-based media group Axel Springer AG and the Swiss-based communications group Publigroupe S.A.. The two also own Zanox AG, another European performance-based online marketing network (allegedly the largest of its kind on the continent).

About the Author

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Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 8 years in online PR. Mihaela writes occasionally for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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