MeetMe announces it will acquire if(we), owner of social networking sites Tagged and Hi5, for $60M
Today we're excited to announce a new chapter in if … Thanks: @gregtseng
Context & Ripple Effects
This is MeetMe's second acquisition in under a year: it bought mobile flirting app Skout for $55 million in cash and stock in mid-2016, and is now paying $60 million for if(we)'s Tagged and Hi5. The company is assembling a portfolio of once-independent social networks rather than building audience organically.
The deal lands in a market where scale plays are escalating elsewhere — Match Group's $1.73B purchase of Hyperconnect came later, and Happn's takeover by Hello Group shows cross-border buyers still paying for established user bases.
First-order effects
- MeetMe immediately adds Tagged and Hi5 to a stable that already includes MeetMe and Skout, giving it four social brands and their combined user bases to monetize.
- if(we)'s shareholders exit at $60M, and Tagged/Hi5 users get a new corporate owner with an acquisition-driven playbook.
Second-order effects
- Rivals face a consolidated competitor that can spread development and monetization costs across multiple aging-but-still-active networks, pressuring standalone mid-tier social apps on pricing and ad inventory.
- The sub-$100M price points here contrast with Match Group's $1.73B Hyperconnect deal, sharpening a two-tier market where large platforms buy capability at scale while smaller players trade whole networks cheaply.
Third-order effects
- If the roll-up pattern holds, independent social networks become acquisition targets by default — but the corpus also shows the downside path: WeWork paid ~$156M for Meetup in 2017 and later sold it to private investors at a fraction of that, a reminder that rolled-up social assets can lose value fast when the parent's strategy shifts.
- Structurally, social networking splits into giant platform owners and multi-brand portfolio companies, with brand-level M&A replacing organic network growth as the main way mid-size players add users.
The trend: Mid-tier social networking is consolidating into multi-brand portfolio companies through serial acquisitions, with MeetMe's Skout-then-if(we) sequence an early template for the wave Match Group and Hello Group later joined at far larger scale.