The best way for ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK) to clean up its act is, apparently, to get Mezi. The interactive marketing company -- dogged by an FTC inquiry over some of its online practices -- is acquiring Smarter.com parent MeziMedia in a move to grow its presence in comparison-shopping websites.
ValueClick will pay $100 million for the company in a deal that may be worth as much as $352 million if certain performance incentives are met.
MeziMedia brings a lot to the table. It's not just Smarter.com, where shoppers can compare prices on more than 20 million different products. The company also runs online coupon-code-seeking hub Coupon Mountain, and MoreRebates.com. More Rebates is a loyalty program similar to MyPoints, where MeziMedia shares the commissions it receives from e-tailers when members buy through MoreRebates.com.
MeziMedia also will give ValueClick a presence in China. MeziMedia has an office in Shanghai, with five times as many employees as back home in the United States. It also launched the Suotianxia metasearch engine in China last year. Mandarin for "search the world," metasearch engines like Suotianxia scour the results of larger engines to produce more inclusive results.
MeziMedia turned a profit last year on $40 million in revenues. We don't know how profitable it is, although ValueClick says that the merger will be accretive to earnings. In other words, earnings once the deal is completed may clock in higher on a per-share basis than originally expected for ValueClick.
This is a good deal for ValueClick. The stock headed lower on the news, though. Speculators who had been snapping up shares, expecting Internet giants like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), or Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) to buy the company, are probably shuffling out the exits today; ValueClick wouldn't be buying companies if it was in serious negotiations to be bought out itself.
Let the speculators bow out. ValueClick was priced for perfection at 30 times next year's earnings estimates, anyway. Let the company assemble the right pieces to grow its interactive marketing empire on a global scale. At the end of the day, that is really the best way to clean up your act.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz doesn't have a problem cleaning up after getting Mezi. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. He is also part of the
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