VirtualTourist and OneTime cost Expedia $85mm according to Venture Beat

Eric Eldon over at the Venture Beat is reporting from an interview with VirtualTourist and OneTime founder J.R.Johnson in his post "No free lunch: The story behind VirtualTourist’s big exit, and Lunch.com".

For those keeping a track of the large number companies bought by TripAdvisor recently, VirtualTourist and OneTime were acquisitions nine and ten in year of frenetic activity by the Expedia owned Tripadvisor (yes...Expedia owns TripAdvisor:)).

Not sure how he did it (and he does not credit Johnson with leaking it) but Eldon has discovered that Expedia/TripAdvisor paid $85mm for the two companies. More back story to the transaction over at the full VentureBeat post.

Hat tip to HotelMarketing where I first saw the story.

Virtual Tourist and OneTime.com join the TripAdvisor Media Network

I have been off the grid so am late in commenting on TripAdvisor's acquisition of social network Virtual Tourist and meta-search company OneTime.com (deal press release here). alarm:clock is crediting the nine year old Virtual Tourist with 5 million uniques and 30 million page views a month. Hotelmarketing.com reported in April that Virtual Tourist had passed the million member mark. The release says that VirtualTourist General Manager Giampiero Ambrosi and OneTime General Manager Dena Yahy will stay with the company but no word on what will happen witth Virtual Tourist founders J.R. Johnson and Tilman Reissfelder.

I have been saying for a while now that TripAdvisor is an advertising network. They are already calling themselves the TripAdvisor Media Network (see the bottom of this press release as an example).

The combined network is carrying some 32 million unique users per month. To put this in perspective I understand that ValueClick Media is the second biggest of the independent advertising networks (here is a list of the top ten from Dec 07). By independent I mean one not owned by a large publisher such as Advertising.com (AOL), BlueLithium (Yahoo!) and aQuantive (Microsoft). ValueClick claim 137mm uniques it their ad network. 32 Million for TripAdvisor is still well short of the ValueClick mark but still more that enough to be a top network. I predict that very soon TripAdvisor will start selling ads for sites they do not own.

I have been keeping a running list of the TripAdvisor acquisitions. Here it is

• OneTime.com;
• Virtual Tourist;
  
• Airfarewatchdog.com;
  
• HolidayWatchdog;
  
• smartertravel.com;
• bookingbuddy.com;
• TravelPod.com;
• Travel-Library.com;
• SeatGuru.com; and
• Cruisecritic.com.

All of which is owned by TripAdvisor's parent Expedia (You would be amazed how much Google traffic I get based on the search "who owns TripAdvisor")

Guillaume over at hotel-blogs has generated a nice graphic to capture them all.

Update - report that Expedia/TripAdvisor paid $85mm for VirtualTourist and OneTime.