Bolt Sells to GoFish to Pay Universal Music Settlement
Written by on February 12th, 2007 in Ajax News.
Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish - a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. The New York Times broke the story tonight. Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock; the three year old GoFish was the first video sharing site to go public last October. Though it has just begun to bring in revenue from licensing deals, GoFish stock closed Friday just under $6 per share with a market value of $134 million.
The settlement was for “several millions of dollars” in cash, stock and advertising credits - presumably much less than the original demand from Universal of $150,000 per infraction.
The acquiring company GoFish, not to be confused with the wildly successful singles’ site PlentyofFish, has recently seen a huge spike in traffic. It was at 1.4 million monthly unique visitors as of December but reports more than 6 million uniques last month. Bolt sees more than 5 million unique visitors monthly (according to Comscore) and turned that traffic into $7 million in revenue last year. GoFish has reported no revenue but has deeper pockets. It was given birth to by Palo Alto investment firm Global Asset Capital.
(more…)
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/89647156/