Google sold Frommer's Travel — but kept all the social media data
but kept all the social media data — People wondered why Google sold Frommer's Travel barely nine months after acquiring it in the first place. The answer is that it's keeping a huge number social media followers from sites like Facebook. — Mystery solved.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google’s 2012 purchase of the Frommer’s brand made its rapid divestiture notable; the retained follower data separates the travel brand from an audience asset accumulated around it.
The move fits a longer Google data-retention debate documented in a 2007 examination of the limited legal constraints on retention, while Facebook’s advertising growth had already sharpened competition for audience data and marketer attention.
First-order effects
- Google keeps the social-media follower data associated with Frommer’s even as the travel brand changes hands, preserving an audience-data asset outside the sale.
- The buyer receives a Frommer’s brand whose associated social following is not included, making the transaction’s brand and audience components distinct.
Second-order effects
- For Google, retaining the data preserves a potential advertising and audience-insight asset while Facebook is expanding into Google’s advertising territory.
- Media-brand buyers and sellers face greater pressure to specify whether social audiences and their associated data transfer with a title, rather than treating them as inseparable from the brand.
Third-order effects
- If this structure is repeated, media acquisitions will increasingly value brands, distribution accounts and audience data as separate assets with separately negotiated rights.
- The episode points toward data governance becoming a central term of content deals, particularly where platform-held social data is more durable than the publication asset itself.
The trend: Digital-media transactions are evolving from sales of titles into negotiations over which party controls the audience data attached to them.