Yahoo! buys! Rivals!
No, not the Jilly Cooper tome
Posted in Entertainment, 21st June 2007 09:56 GMT
Free whitepaper – Blade learning lab and technical community
Yahoo! has bought college and high school sports site Rivals.com.
Yahoo! says the buy will bolster its existing sports coverage, which mostly focuses on national sports. Rivals, which opened in 2001, claims two million visitors a month and concentrates on college football and basketball.
The deal, we're told, is all about community and Rivals' "most engaged sports audience on the internet".
Although financial terms were not disclosed, speculation is that Yahoo! paid in the region of $100m.
Rivals has 180,000 subscribers who pay $10 a month, and the site also brings in cash from advertising and ecommerce.
The deal comes days after co-founder Jerry Yang took over the top job at Yahoo!, replacing Terry Semel, although presumably he didn't put the deal together in four days.
The Yahoo! release is here, or the statement from Rivals' CEO Shannon Terry is here. ®
Free whitepaper – Optimizing the data center for cost and efficiency

The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit

Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter