Ybrant Digital, a Hyderabad based digital marketing solutions company, has inked a stock purchase agreement to acquire Lycos Inc from Daum Communications of Korea for $36 million, in an all cash deal. Daum had bought the non-European and non-Spanish business of Lycos from Spain's Telefonica owned entity Terra Networks, back in 2004 for $95 million. (Update:) It sold Quote.com ($30 million), Wired.com ($25 million), Matchmaker.com, Getrelevant.com and Webmonkey.com since 2006, so the transactions are not exactly comparable. Terra had itself bought Lycos for $12.5 billion in 2000 in an all stock deal. Terra eventually shut down Lycos Europe in 2008, and Lycos (Daum) bought back rights for Europe. So Ybrant has bought a company with worldwide rights to Lycos owned brands. Over the past few years, Ybrant has acquired Australian ad network company Max Interactive, Israeli ad firm Oridian ($13.5 million), US-based DW Net Ventures LLC / MediosOne ($4 million), Serbia-based Seenetix for its flagship bulk emailing product VoloMP ($2.2 million) and US- based Pennyweb Inc ($10 million) and Argentina based ad network DreamAd. (Also read: How Ybrant Funds Its Acquisitions) Update: According to a recent filing (pdf) from Daum communications, Daum's only Global SBU (i.e. Lycos) reported revenues of KRW 8984 million (around $7.2 million) for the quarter ended June 30th 2010, and an operating profit of KRW 1884 million (around $1.58 million). Lycos underwent a restructuring in 2009. Going by the revenues, of around $24.74 million, this appears to be a rather reasonably priced deal. Source: Daum financials for Q109, Q209, Q309,…
