Hitwise Acquired by Experian for $240 Million
Thursday, April 19th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us, have paid off big time for the web intelligence company. Information services provider Experian has announced their cash purchase of Hitwise for $240 million.
Experian is hoping to provide more internet intelligence to its client base, and the acquisition of Hitwise will help it do that, and more. While you may know Hitwise from all of their great analysis of web trends and site traffic, the company does a lot more than simply issue fancy charts. Collecting and aggregating information from 25+ million web users around the world, Hitwise watches more than a million sites and has more than 1200 clients including, Google, eBay, AXA and CBS News.
Don Robert, Chief Executive Officer of Experian, commented: “We have been successfully repositioning our Marketing Solutions business to meet our clients’ needs as they continue to switch more of their advertising spend online. Hitwise, which is a rapidly growing, successful business, brings new, unique data to Experian and complements the existing data, tools and expertise that we already offer to clients in other areas such as research services and email distribution.â€
Congratulations to everyone at Hitwise. With the new support of Experian, we expect more great things from them.
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April 19th, 2007 at 11:59 am
[...] Hitwise has been bought by general analytical service provider Experian (12k ee’s, 3.1bn revenue). News from Marketing Pilgrim, via TechMeme. Incidentally, Hitwise has an interesting approach to collecting stats, gathering metrics directly from ISP’s: Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length. [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
[...] Three cheers for these folks coming down off the “I see the traffic, now here’s a quarterly press release” high-horse that their competitors are too often on. Blogger Andy Beal writes similarly this morning. “All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us,” he quips, “have paid off big time for the web intelligence company.” [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
[...] Hitwise Acquired by Experian for $240 Million | Marketing Pilgrim All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us, have paid off big time for the web intelligence company. Information services provider Experian has announced their cash purchase of Hitwise for $240 million. (tags: hitwise experian webanalytics) [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
[...] Hitwise Acquired by Experian for $240 Million | Marketing Pilgrim All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us, have paid off big time for the web intelligence company. Experian has announced their cash purchase of Hitwise for $240 million. (tags: hitwise intelligence acquisition charts experian) [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 9:39 am
[...] Hitwise Acquired by Experian Hitwise, the company that performs analysis of log files from 25 million worldwide ISP accounts to provide relative market share graphs for web properties, has been acquired by Experian for $240 million [via Dave McClure and Marketing Pilgrim…] [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Are you in Hitwise’s 25 million clickstreams?
How would you ever know?
What’s wrong with this picture?
Pretty much everything!
April 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 am
Hitwise has done tremendously well, especially internationally. What they have traditionally lacked in “media quality” ratings (e.g. accurate page view and user numbers instead of the rankings and relative traffic figures they provie) they have more than made up for in price, service and user interface. Congrats to all the Hitwise folks, some of them my former coworkers at JMXI
BUT, I must say this acquisition is both surprising and not surprising to me. Experian’s online group’s strategy still escapes me for the most part (hence not surprising), though some of the synergy between the various firms they’ve bought may still materialize later because of earnouts they haven’t influenced the operations of individual companies too much - but at least for a previous target like LowerMybills I can see some obvious synergies. On the Hitwise side, I am very skeptical since Hitwise as a ratings service is the furthest away from “identifying unique users” among its peers, which is essentially Experian’s traditional business line - plus if they went down that road I’m sure you’d see some real privacy uproar (hmmm I wonder though — IP-based “online user profile” system? shudder!). Synergies like leveraging relationships with Hitwise clients to sell email marketing software (as mentioned in the press release) is highly unlikely given the usual salesforce focus type of issues and the fact that it’s often not the same people buying these two different services… so in short, a bit unexpected and weird deal but it’s not the first (or I suspect the last) strange one Experian will do.
We’ll have to chat to the Hitwise guys at Adtech this coming week and find out the scoop!
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:21 pm
This is fourth acquisition of Experian within last two years:LowerMyBills.com, PriceGrabber.com, CheetahMail.com and now Hitwise. Experian gets a hold over huge information base on consumer behavoir.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:51 am
From last posts I read I can imagine that Experian will be acquired by Google soon. Does Google has such tracking service as Hitwise?