06-21-2007 9:23 AM — Well it’s official. Yahoo! is buying Rivals.com.
After months of speculation that such a deal was in the works the companies jointly announced the transaction yesterday.
Rumors have been flying around since April that Yahoo! was eyeing the Brentwood-based sports information site, and that Rivals.com, which just barely survived the dot-com bust, was going to bring a nine figure price tag.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed in today’s announcement, but paidContent.org today claims that the figure comes close to $100 million.
Since its near-demise and rebirth, Rivals.com has seen tremendous growth as site traffic has continued to multiply.
In 2006 alone, the site saw more than 3.5 billion pageviews. This year, on national signing day for college football recruits, the site tracked 74.3 million pageviews in a single day.
Regardless of what they paid, it seems clear that Yahoo! is going to enjoy a healthy boost in traffic as a result of this purchase.
Rivals.com already boasts some 180,000 subscribers, each of whom pays close to $100 per year to use the site. Yahoo! expects the traffic figures and the subscriber figures to increase rapidly once the site has Yahoo!’s marketing department behind it.
Through the deal, Rivals.com will be integrated into Yahoo! Sports but will continue to operate as an independent brand, with the senior management team, including CEO Shannon Terry, remaining in place.
One of the other details to emerge from the blogosphere rumor mill lately was Terry’s past run-in with the Securities & Exchange Commission. According to TechCrunch, and documents from the SEC, Terry was part of a “pump and dump” scheme back in the late 1990s.
When asked about any reservations Yahoo! might have, one Yahoo! official told paidContent.org: “It is what it is, but we were comfortable [it] wouldn’t prevent us from doing the transaction.”
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