Latest big acquisition hit hard by Google algorithm updates.
Oversee.net has made a few big acquisitions over the years, and something always seems to go wrong.
There was Moniker, which the company bought at the peak of the domain name auction market.
Then there was SnapNames, which lost its best source of domains names (Network Solutions) to a joint venture with eNom shortly thereafter. And who can forget about the Halvarez shill bidding scandal.
It appears that its latest big acquisition may also suffer from poor timing.
In late January the company announced the acquisition of shopping site ShopWiki.com.
Shortly thereafter Google released its Panda update aimed at content farms. By all accounts, this update had a negative impact on ShopWiki and its peers such as TheFind.com and BizRate in Google.
I don’t know for certain how much traffic ShopWiki lost due to Panda. (Oversee.net declined to comment for this story.) But three major ranking services — Compete.com, Quantcast.com, and Alexa, show significant declines in traffic post Panda.
Here’s Compete’s graph, with the red line showing when Oversee announced the acquisition:
This is a similar graph from Quantcast for U.S. people:
Alexa estimates that page views are down 25% over the last three months.
It’s possible that the acquisition included some earn-outs or other hurdles that limited Oversee’s downside on the acquisition. And it may have paid a good price. But usually when you acquire a company you have a plan to grow the traffic and revenue, not watch it precipitously drop.
That’s what appears to have happened here — Oversee.net bought ShopWiki at its peak.
Michael Martinez says
Although the data does appear to support your conclusions, these curves are too crude to really show that the traffic loss may be connected to Panda. You need weekly data points to see a Panda curve.
Sites often lose traffic after they change ownership for any number of reasons. Also, shopping sites are notoriously seasonal. The traffic loss may reflect a lot of seasonal shifting in consumer habits.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Michael – I suspect the season is responsible for some of the downshift, but the lost page 1 rankings on Google suggest a big part of it is lower rankings.
The multi-year Quantcast chart shows a huge drop off after Panda compared to after the holidays in previous years.
Rob Sequin says
How is oversee still in business?
Really? I would love to see people post great things about any Oversee company.
Anyone?
Dalia Mcknight says
I really enjoy the blog article.Much thanks again.