Compete Acquired by TNS

Web analytics provider Compete.com has been acquired by market research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS).

Compete, with roughly $15 million in revenue in 2007, is smaller than rivals comScore, Quantcast and Alexa, but has been growing at a rapid pace. The Company reported a loss of $4.9 million for 2007. According to TechCrunch, the deal is for $75 million cash with the possibility of an additional $75 million in earnouts.

Compete was founded in 2000 as an Idealab company. The TechCrunch post notes that they've raised $43 million in funding to-date.

UK based TNS is a more traditional market research firm, so the combination of TNS+Compete should provide clients with a picture of user behavior both online and offline. TNS Media Intelligence is the leading ad-spend intelligence service, while their 6th Dimension access panels survey more than 2 million consumers globally.

Comments

[joshua-feinberg]

Hi Barry,

I've often wondered why the relative traffic data that Alexa and Compete provide hasn't become part of mainstream search engine results pages... or at least why Google, or Microsoft or Yahoo! wasn't interested in an acquisition like this.

Thanks for the heads up.

Joshua Feinberg