Reminds me of the Polaroid acquisition:

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/private-equity-...

It was mentioned that Polaroid was one of the most recognized brands in the world and $59 million was a relative bargain.

Update: See corrected link and figure ($89 million) below.

Unrelated, but I think Knight's Bridge actually got them -- and for a lot more: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS174749+17-Ap...

You're absolutely right. I couldn't remember the PE group and CNN and NY Times both showed Patriarch Partners for the acquirer when I googled it.

I worked for a company that had 3 completely different websites selling electronics. The backend was the same (i.e. same products and descriptions), but the prices were different.

Essentially they competed with themself. They actually got some orders on the more pricey site! And the price checkers were happy thinking they checked a few sites, and found the lower one.

This is a fairly common occurrence in the real world, too. I knew a guy whose father worked for a company that manufactured windshield wiper fluid, which was packaged and branded in three varieties: budget, midline and premium. Identical product, three different price points, and all had good sales, because they were going after different market segments.

Not every sale is driven by "low price"-- in fact, in some segments, low price is a turn-off.

Managing the SEO/PPC for those 3 sites had to be a massive headache.

Yes, but that's not a 1-man job. And that company is EXTREMELY smart.

It may sound stupid to compete with yourself, but what about 'owning' a google search term? Good SEO on all 3 sites may result in 3 top 10 rankings for a single product, 1 on each site.

If you owned position 1, 2 and 3 - what % of that search traffic do you think you would get?

Am I right in assuming that not much is paid to so called search engine optimization among start ups? The products and services market themselves virally(?).

It really depends. If you're in a very competitive market (cough tickets cough) SEO is essential.

Also, good SEO has made some startups. Examples: About.com, Yelp.com

You should be thinking about SEO (at least partially) with any content-driven site you launch.

There is also much more to SEO than just friendly titles and URLs, but that's always a good place to start. For most startups SEO is normally handed off to anyone working on PR/Marketing/Viral efforts.

A good place to start for most people would be Brad Callen's SEO Mindset e-book (http://www.seomindset.com/index2.htm) - Aaron Wall's SEO Book is a bit outdated. (Both of these can be easily found on other 'content networks' - but SEO Mindset is worth the small investment ($97) if you know nothing about SEO)

just stick to basics, it doesn't take too much effort to make SEO friednly urls/titles

thats just stupid, pagerank != brand equity, not by a long shot.

Agreed, but the rest of the article acknowledges that.

I might be wrong in my thinking but:

Isn't this a kind of a weird buy I mean everyone saw that circuit city went bankrupt and out of business it was highly public through many news outlets including headline news for many weeks doesn't that destroy a brand and make the website much less trusted?