VentureBeat

updated with input from Affinity

Monster, the giant job listing company, has acquired Silicon Valley’s Affinity Labs, a company that runs several online community sites — including for police officer, healthcare employees, teachers, government employees and technologists. The purchase price was about $61 million.

This is an eyebrow raising price, because most of Affinity’s sites are just a few months old, and we’re told they have less than 500,000 visitors a month combined. In other words, the price translates into $122 a visitor, which is relatively high. [Update: Affinity tells it gets 800,000 visitors a month, which translates into a more reasonable $76 a visitor] It’s a big win for Affinity, which received a $6 million round of capital a year ago from Silicon Valley venture firms Mayfield and Trinity (yes, at the time, we cited a source that said $10 million, but the company took only $6 million).

On the other hand, Monster has a tight relationship with Affinity’s chief executive, Christopher Michel (pictured top), who served Monster well earlier: He co-founded Military.com, and sold it to Monster in 2004, and it has since become a leading portal for military personnel and their families. Monster bought that company for $40 million when the Internet market was still depressed after the bubble burst. But Military.com has since grown to more than 7 million uniques a month, and is probably worth on the order of $700 million or more for Monster right now.

And the visitors to Affinity’s sites have focused interests, making them attractive to advertisers. They’re easier to target. Because the sites are aligned according to industry vocation, it makes them especially attractive to a company like Monster, which specializes in job listings. Strategically, this acquisition makes a lot of sense, and the overall price, while high for Affinity’s current traffic, isn’t that much considering Monster’s size.

[Update: I just talked with Michel, and he confirms that he's going to be working closely with Monster to help bring it more visibility in Silicon Valley, working with other companies with community-oriented sites to see if a relationship with Monster makes sense. Update II: He adds that a million members have registered at Affinity's sites.]

Here’s part of the statement:

Monster has acquired Affinity Labs Inc., a development stage company that operates a portfolio of professional and vocational communities for people entering, advancing and networking in certain dedicated occupations. Affinity’s network of vertical community sites will provide Monster’s overall user and job seeker base relevant content and community features while enabling the Company to increase its online advertising services to a larger, targeted customer base.

Sal Iannuzzi, Monster’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, “We believe Affinity’s model complements the core Monster business and significantly enhances our presence in key verticals within the online vocational and networking market. Our investment in Affinity provides Monster with an efficient vehicle for developing future revenue streams in vibrant career fields while permitting us to actively invest in product, technology and brand support in our core business. The addition of Affinity Labs to the Monster family will benefit both job seekers and customers in the vertical markets where Affinity operates.”

Affinity uses a technology platform that allows for rapid development cycles and scalability in servicing multiple high growth career fields. Currently, Affinity operates 7 professional and career oriented networks that include law enforcement, healthcare, education, government and technology. The combination of Monster and Affinity Labs will enhance Monster’s service offering to job seekers by providing highly relevant content through career guides, industry job searches, trade news and social networking. Employers will also benefit by having efficient access to a targeted pool of job candidates in desirable career fields. Monster and Affinity were parties to an agreement, signed early in 2007, that leveraged Monster’s advertising sales force and allowed job seekers access to Affinity’s portfolio of sites when registering for a MyMonster account.

Affinity Labs is led by Christopher Michel, the founder of Military.com, which was acquired by Monster in 2004 and has become the leading vertical portal for military personnel and their families. Mr. Michel will join the Monster executive team and report directly to Mr. Iannuzzi.

The purchase price for the transaction was approximately $61 million in cash. The Company does not anticipate the acquisition having a material impact on financial results in 2008. Monster was advised by Goldman, Sachs & Co. on the transaction

(Update: VentureBeat has now confirmed this with a source, who says details have to be wrapped up before an announcement is made. There is no exact price yet, because that is one of the things still being negotiated. It is somewhere between $400 million, which is Photobucket’s asking price, and $200 million, which is what MySpace asked for. Also, see latest stats below.)

Photo-sharing site Photobucket has agreed on terms to be acquired by the giant social network Myspace, Valleywag first reported.

Despite the lack of attribution, details being linked strongly suggest there’s something to this (and others are now saying the purchase price is $250 million). We’ve just gotten off the phone with Alice Lankester, senior director of product marketing, who said the company is not commenting, but that she’d let VentureBeat know if there was anything to say. Valleywag often gets it material from rank and file employees slipping rumors to the publication. Much of it is accurate. Much isn’t. (Update: In this case, it was accurate).

Photobucket is a convenient service for storing and sharing photos and is used by many MySpace users, who link to their Photobucket photos from MySpace. Photobucket’s robust growth has been a thorn in the side for MySpace, which is jealously trying to offer its own photo-sharing service. See stats below for the latest from Hitwise traffic, which shows Photobucket now commands a 40 percent market share in photo sharing. The two have come to blows several times (VentureBeat’s coverage), with MySpace arguing Photobucket’s marketing strategies violate its terms of service. But the two patched things up recently without explanation — another hint.

Photobucket has called an all-hands staff meeting for 10am PST this morning, ValleyWag reports. Photobucket’s bankers, Lehman Brothers, were reportedly looking for a purchase price of at least $300 million.

This would be a huge deal for co-founders Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, who started the company in 2003, and for Trinity Ventures, which invested $10.5 million last year. Tom Cole, partner at Trinity and Photobucket board member, also said he couldn’t comment. Before last year’s round, Photobucket raised $2.5 million from individual investors.

Here are the stats from Hitwise:

- Photobucket is the number one visited website in its “photography/entertainment” category, receiving 39.63% of visits to that category for the week ending May 5, 2007
- Photobucket is the 22nd most visited website overall in the US among all US websites for the week ending May 5, 2007
- 58.78% of Photobucket’s traffic came from MySpace.com and MySpace Mail combined for the week ending May 5, 2007.
- Based on Hitwise Clickstream data, Photobucket was the fifth most popular website visited after MySpace.com, with 1.7% of the traffic leaving MySpace.com to go to Photobucket for the week ending May 5, 2007.
- MySpace.com was the most visited US domain receiving 5.85% of all US online traffic according to Hitwise for the week ending May 5, 2007.

Yahoo has acquired Bix, the Palo Alto start-up that lets people compete in online karaoke, hot or not and other contests.

The amount was undisclosed, but this acquisition was fast; Bix launched barely three months ago.

It is the latest sign of focus by Yahoo in its acquisition strategy. Its purchases have slowed to a trickle, but the deals it has completed concern community, user-generated sites (Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org and Jumpcut), which stands in contrast with Google, which has focused on applications.

Bix raised $6.77 million in a first round of funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Stanford. It is yet another win for angel investor Amidzad, the separate venture fund created by the Palo Alto rug merchants who, aside from various international investments, also own lots of office property in Palo Alto. They invested in Bix when it moved into their property on Florence Street, and saw a nice profit on this investment, we’re told.

The idea behind Bix was to let companies sponsor the competitions online, handing out gifts to the winners. Bix is also planning to let users embed a widget on their own Web sites featuring the Bix contests.

We note the rather overt reference to its mature content on its home page (see below).

Updated

Practical Instruments has raised $8 million in a first round of funding to develop what it says is the most powerful solar “concentration” technology yet.

It uses solar panels that track the sun as it moves. The panels use mirrors to concentrate the sunlight for the photovoltaic process, thereby boosting performance.

It is the latest in a wave of entrants in the booming solar power industry, and will compete against a number of other “concentration” companies, including Energy Innovations, SolFocus and Solaria. It will be presenting its technology at the Solar Power 2006 expo in San Jose this week. (See summary of the solar wave in the Mercury News today.)

RockPort Capital Partners and Nth Power led the venture capital round. Trinity Ventures and Rincon Venture Partners also participated.

The wave of solar funding joins a wider boom in alternative energy investments: In just the last few days, we’ve seen solar monitoring start-up Fat Spaniel, power management company iWatt, biofuel start-up Primafuel (Long Beach, Calif.) and biofuel start-up Amyris all raise new financing.

Practical Instruments chief executive Brad Hines said he is taking a different tack than the other solar competitors. Two years ago, Hines left competitor Energy Innovations, which users a similar tracking technology. But that technology was early and the panels required “tower” and other support structures that created panels different to those the industry was familiar with, Hines said. As a result, the company struggled to create what is effectively its own distribution channel. While Energy Innovations boasted a good concentration technology, installers didn’t know what to do with it, he said. (We wrote about Energy Innovations here last year, when it raised venture capital. We contacted Energy Innovations President Andrew Beebe for a response to Hines’ critique; he declined comment).

So Hines, who was also a “chief architect” at NASA, founded Practical Instruments (see team in picture) with the goal of making panels that are the same shape as regular solar panels. He also pledges they will cost less and produce more power. The company’s panels can produce 30 percent more power for a given area than the current leaders, he says. However, the company hasn’t started delivering its product or set pricing yet, so we’ll see if he pulls this off.

The company’s technology resides on the rooftop, and so can be installed on more buildings than, say SolFocus, which requires a ground mounting and is more focused on serving utilities, he said.

Solaria, another company we’ve written about, has raised money for panels with concentration technology — but its technology does not use tracking, and so it’s limited to only two to three times the regular concentration of sunlight on the solar cells. Practical Instruments see concentration levels of about ten times regular concentration.

The investment will fund the production of Practical Instruments’ flagship product, Heliotube, the company said.