Infospace to Merge with Marchex

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Infospace To Merge With Marchex?

By: Chris "Silver" Smith
2007-10-17

At least, thats what this Forbes article theorizes as one possible explanation, quoting a Wall Street analyst: Scott Sutherland, an analyst at...

...Wedbush Morgan Securities, said the most likely scenario is that the company will take InfoSpace private to save money or merge with the search and media company, Marchex, whose executives are former executives at InfoSpace.

Just yesterday, I expressed a bit of confusion about why InfoSpace made deals to sell off their mobile services to Motricity, and sell off directory services to Idearcs Superpages

Greg Stirling also expressed a bit of wonder about the reasoning behind the deal, too. (I swear we didnt read each others posts before writing our comments!)

Southerland reported that the mobile services unit was actually bleeding money, though, so that explains selling off that portion, perhaps.

Could Sutherlands merge-with-Marchex theory be right? One still has to wonder why InfoSpace would off-load Switchboard if they were to merge with another local information company, since keeping it would give them much more combined clout. Marchex owns a few directory sites already, including Yellow.com, AreaConnect, and YPeek, but none of these come close to the traffic of Switchboard.

Southerland further theorizes that if they are staying independent instead of merging, and are truly concentrating on developing the business around search, they might focus solely on metasearch, such as found in their Dogpile site.

Its really going to be interesting to see where this is headed.

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Tag: Infospace, Marchex

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About the Author:
Chris formerly headed up the Advanced Technology Department for Verizon Superpages.com (later spun off under Idearc Media), where he worked for ten years, specializing in patent-pending work in mapping, local search, analytics, and SEO. As the natural search optimization expert for Idearc, he founded and chaired the company's SEO Council. Chris is currently a Lead Search Strategist for Netconcepts, a search optimization firm. Chris is a regular columnist for Search Engine Land, covering the 'local search' beat. He also blogs for Natural Search Blog, and speaks at industry conferences such as Search Engine Strategies.


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