2008 was the year defined more by the deals that did not go through in the media/information sector. The dollar volume of deals that failed, including Informa ($6.7 billion), Reed Business Information ($1.0 billion), and Cygnus Business Media ($200 million), among others, dwarfed the $2.0 billion dollar volume of the deals that went through, according to a year-end note by i-bankers DeSilva & Phillips (disclosure: one of our sponsors). On the consumer side, I would add the big MSFT-YHOO non-deal to it; also the Entrepreneur Media deal, valued at around $175 million (and being repped by DeSilva themselves) that didn’t go through.
Also, even though the year
last two big deals were Bebo and Quigo.