Boston – November 16, 2012 – Great Hill Partners, LLC, a leading private equity firm focused on growth companies, announced the sale of its portfolio company Ziff Davis, Inc. to j2 Global, Inc. (NasdaqGS: JCOM), a provider of cloud services. The purchase price was $175 million. Based on a public company release, the purchase price represented approximately 2.9X estimated 2013 revenue.
Great Hill Partners purchased Ziff Davis in June 2010 with online media executive Vivek Shah. At the time of purchase, the company was owned by the former bond holders of a previous buyout and consisted primarily of consumer electronics web sites led by PCMag.com. Shah revitalized the business with the serial purchase of logicbuy.com, geek.com, computershopper.com, toolbox.com and the enterprise tech lead gen business Focus Research. In addition, the company launched a number of innovative new products, most significantly the BuyerBase ad targeting platform. BuyerBase collects information from over 100 technology sites and comingles the data with proprietary information to enable highly targeted advertising of 40 million US consumers deep in the purchase funnel.
Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, said, “The financial and strategic support of Great Hill Partners was critical to our success and they proved to be tremendous and trusted partners at every step. I feel genuinely privileged to have worked with such an outstanding group of investment professionals."
Chris Gaffney, Managing Partner at Great Hill Partners added, “Vivek Shah is an unusual combination of strategic vision and management talent. He designed the plan, built a amazing team and executed flawlessly in building the company from a concept and a number of unconnected pieces into the attractive operating platform it is today. We are proud to have been a part of the company’s revitalization.
Ziff Davis was represented by Luma Partners in the transaction.
About Ziff Davis
Ziff Davis, Inc. is a leading digital media company specializing in the technology market, reaching over 50 million in-market buyers every month. Ziff Davis sites feature trusted reviews of the newest and hottest tech products, news, commentary, tech deals and much more. Our portfolio includes our flagship PCMag.com, ComputerShopper, ExtremeTech, Geek.com, Toolbox.com and LogicBUY.com. Ziff Davis also helps marketers drive sales with its latest product, BuyerBase™, an advanced ad targeting platform focused 100% on in-market tech buyers. Ziff Davis B2B is a leading provider of online research to enterprise buyers and serves IT and cloud services vendors.
About Great Hill Partners
Great Hill Partners is a private equity firm that manages more than $2.5 billion in capital to finance the expansion, recapitalization or acquisition of growth companies in a wide range of sectors within the business and consumer services, media, communications and software industries. Great Hill targets investments of $25 million to $150 million. For more information, please visit www.greathillpartners.com.
