Sources: Google Is Close to Buying Meebo
Google is in talks to acquire Meebo, according to two sources close to the situation. — The price for the company would be about $100 million, according to one of the sources. — Meebo's latest product promises to help users cut through information overload.
Context & Ripple Effects
Meebo has been circling an exit for years: back in April 2008 it walked away from a sale because no buyer met its price and raised funding instead, having already monetized through ads around its Meebo Rooms launch in 2007. Now AllThingsD reports, per two unnamed sources, that Google is close to buying the company for about $100 million — a number that frames how far consumer-web valuations have come down from the billion-dollar rumors of 2008, when Google was also floated as a suitor for Bebo at $1–1.5 billion.
The pickup has been unusually broad for an unconfirmed deal — VentureBeat, CNET, The Verge, CNET and others all ran the same sourcing within a day — which suggests the story is being treated as near-done even though both sides are quiet. It lands mid-flurry for Google, days after it rolled out the Google+ mobile app and quietly launched Google Offers nationally, and less than a year after preliminary talks to buy Hulu showed the company still shopping for consumer-facing properties.
First-order effects
- If the reported ~$100 million deal closes, Meebo's roughly hundred-person operation stops being an independent publisher-tools vendor and becomes another Google property, with its information-overload product folded into Google's portfolio.
- Publishers running Meebo's engagement bar face immediate uncertainty over whether the tool keeps operating under new ownership.
Second-order effects
- The deal would hand Google a distribution surface across third-party publishers' pages just as it pushes Google+ sharing — a channel competitors building social layers cannot buy as cheaply once it is off the market.
- Other venture-backed consumer-web companies stuck below their hoped-for exit prices gain a data point: strategic acquirers will pay eight figures, not nine, for audience tools, resetting founder expectations.
Third-order effects
- The pattern here — a once-hot consumer startup that refused a lower price in 2008 and sold four years later for roughly a tenth of the era's headline numbers — points toward independent consumer-web companies consolidating into platform giants as tuck-in acquisitions rather than standing alone.
- If Google keeps pairing organic launches (Google+, Offers) with targeted purchases of engagement-layer startups, the structural effect is publishers' on-page social tooling converging under a handful of large platforms.
The trend: Consumer-web startups that stayed independent past their peak valuation window are exiting as eight-figure tuck-ins to platform companies, trading standalone futures for distribution inside giants like Google.