Social Media Remains Engine of Growth for Tech Market
One of the hottest segments in the online space has been the rapidly growing social media space. Social media includes those applications that allow users to connect with one another, create and share content. The term social media brings to mind the big platform brands such as Facebook, MySpace or YouTube, but the social media space is much broader, encompassing specific categories such as content, experiential media, media creation, mobile, social networks, tools & software, and services.
ContentNext has recently released its Social Media Deals Report, which looks at trends reflected by the deals which have been driving social media during the fifteen month period Q1, 2007 through the end of Q1, 2008.
Social networks were by far the most active category with more than fifty acquisitions during the period, led by AOL’s (NYSE:TWX) $850 million acquisition of Bebo. Beyond the social networks, the distribution is quite diverse with blogs, ad networks and tool providers each seeing at least ten deals in the period.
The most active acquirers during the period were Internet Brands (NASD:INET) with seven transactions, Yahoo! (NASD:YHOO) with 5 transactions, and Disney (NYSE:DIS), Handheld Entertainment (NASD:ZVUE) and Google (NASD:GOOG), with four transactions each.
Boston-based angel network Common Angels led the venture investing, participating in a dozen rounds. Accel Partners, Edgestone Capital, General Catalyst Partners and JK&B Capital each participated in nine investment rounds.
The complete 199-page Social Media Deals Report, which includes a comprehensive listing of social media deals, is available for purchase.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.