The company that brings us Nickelodeon and MTV isn't about to give up fighting for young blood. Yesterday, Viacom (NYSE: VIA) announced that it will acquire online teen magnet Quizilla.com for an undisclosed amount.
So what exactly is Quizilla? As the name suggests, it started out as a website where users generate quizzes. Given that some of the more popular quizzes involve picking out prom dresses, assigning popular song lyrics to your frame of mind, and annoying your classmates, the site has been good at attracting the teen demographic.
Thanks to the use of tags to sort through the submissions and the ability for users to embed their quizzes on other websites and forums, Quizilla has been a viral winner. It has also evolved to allow users to broadcast their short stories and poetry. The site had 3.1 million unique visitors last month, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Viacom's first order of business seems to be to incorporate the embedded video-player technology it is using on The-N.com to the text-driven Quizilla. In other words, Viacom seems to be piecing together its own version of YouTube with the social-networking goodies of MySpace.
Yes, Viacom did miss out on both of those deals. It was bidding for MySpace alongside News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) but ultimately lost. And it probably wasn't interested in trying to top Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) $1.65 billion deal for YouTube.
Viacom has gone for smaller bites. Over the past two years, the company has acquired Atom, Xfire, iFilm, and NeoPets. Some believe the deals may have been too small, and most believe the size of those deals is what led to the dismissal of CEO Tom Freston last month. The moves certainly haven't won over the critics. Yesterday, Goldman Sachs downgraded shares of Viacom, with the opinion that News Corp. has more upside at the moment.
I don't see it that way. I think Viacom is assembling the right pieces. Viacom has missed out on making a big splash with any single deal, but the more you dig into the past purchases, the more you realize that the company still has its pulse on what matters to young audiences.
Keep nibbling, Viacom. Sooner or later, Wall Street will move in and take a bite.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz doesn't know whether he still wants his MTV, but he knows that Viacom's shareholders wouldn't mind money for nothing. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story.
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