By Aimee Chanthadavong
Yahoo!7 has snapped up both the Australian and New Zealand operations of group buying site Spreets for $40 million.
Rohan Lund CEO of Yahoo!7 said the acquisition will help leverage the company’s local and social strategies and diversifying its revenue outside of display advertising.
“Our strategy in Australia has always been very simple. We want to connect as many people to people and things that matter the most to them. The way we use the web is changing and we needed to change ourselves to do this. We need to recognise the revolution of social mobility of electronic commerce but our strategy always remains the same,” he said.
“Our customers are advertisers and businesses. We’ve had a tremendous few years where we’ve built display search business but we need to keep diversifying our revenue by helping small and medium businesses target their audience as well.
“Spreets will help us execute our plans on our local and social strategies. It will help fuel this growth to the top and bottom line of Yahoo!7 this year.”
Spreets (spreets.com.au and spreets.co.nz), which has been in operation for almost a year, was the first group buying site in Australia and New Zealand. It offers 50 to 90 per cent discounted deals and packages across categories including experiences, day spas, health and wellness and retail.
According to Lund, Spreets will continue to operate as a separate entity to Yahoo!7.
“I’m keen to see Spreets continue to exist as its own brand and own website. We’ll make the offers available on our website and to our network and it will have access to all Yahoo’s resources,” he said.
“We’ll certainly be investing a lot on the technology side because we all expect that this will continue evolving and as we think about mobility, e-commerce and retail.”
Spreets CEO Dean McEvoy said he is thrilled with acquisition and believes that being acquired by Yahoo!7 it will give Spreets a great advantage in the group buying market.
“We’re already number one in the market. We’ve managed to do that at the back of a small investment while the other guys out there haven’t had much of a success as us. And we’ve managed to do that without Yahoo but now we have them backing us we think we’d be unstoppable,” he said.
“We’re also the only site that has run exclusive deals with chef hatted restaurants because we’ve built such a good audience.”