MIH India In Talks To Acquire Burrp?
ContentSutra has learned from multiple sources that Naspers owned MIH India is in talks to buy local listings and review site Burrp.com. Rajeev Sathe, Director of Strategy and Commercial for Burrp refused to confirm the news, saying only that they’re in discussion with several potential investors to raise capital to increase the pace of growth. They’re also in talks with leading brands to roll out more services, aggregate more content, tie up with ticket booking sites, and for syndicating their content (like this deal with Google (NSDQ: GOOG))…but are they looking to sell out to MIH India? No comments.
Burrp had received an undisclosed amount of angel funding from unspecified investors last year. MIH India, it is believed, has a warchest of $60 million for deploying in India over three years. So far they have bought 30 percent stake in Mobile VAS co ACL Wireless for 30 percent, and acquired startups Bixee and Pixrat.
LOL ,ROTFL .
Q: What is difference between God and Ashish KAshyap ?
Ans: GOD Doesn't think he is Ashish Kashyap .
Good bless Share holders of Nasper ,
I hope MIH doesn't ruin Burrp, cause it's a great service. They've really been swallowing everything up lately…
Why would Burrp (if this info is true) want to ally itself with someone like MIH? I am sure they must care about their little reputation…. But then Burrp is afterall a review site, not a technological marvel, so likes bed with likes I presume:)
More money will come to India from South Africa and allow Burrp and MIH India employees to buy new cars and flats….when they exhaust 60 million then they can always find new jobs…not a bad deal afterall :-)
Seems that MIH has too much money and does not know what to do with it. Buying Burrp does not make any business sense. Burrp, stand alone, is struggling to make any money (has no viable business model for India) & I don't think that changes with joining MIH.
Anyways, what is MIH trying to gain by grabbing Burrp?
- Traffic? Burrp has extremely low traffic
- Content? It's mostly copied from several public / private sources which are available to anyone.
- Technology/ Product? It's a very standard technology wrapped around with good add-ons. One should be able to build this in few months. Burrp is a well packaged site but acquiring it just for good packaging makes no sense.
And if Burrp does get acquired for reason # 3, then it will not be a good valuation for Burrp & its team. Lets see how it turns out !
Perhaps aquitition of burrp sense because
1) you get relevant employees which is extremely hard to find and perhaps couple of burrp key smart folks can focus on MIH India products
2) burrp model aligns well with MIH i.e. UGC
3) MIH India gets to remain in the news and show its doing something
MIH can emerge a single largest player in the Indian UGC market.
All said and done this will be a good way to utilize money in the bank otherwise how the heck one will spend so much money legaly.
well, using burrp is a bit scary – there is no security of my password when i login into the site – so guess any hacker can easily find out what password i am keying in to login into burrp – and then use the same password to access other important sites that i access :-(
Hi More Insightful,
I agree with part of what you said, especially the part of using the money legally :)
1. As far as I know, they have 2-3 key employees only. They have partnered with a firm to get the product. And purely to get those 2-3 key employees, one would not pay more that $100K-150K per employee (on the higher side) – so that makes it a $0.5 mn valuation – way too crappy a deal then.
2. True, but neither have traffic.
3. This I totally agree with :)
Can someone pls tell me if there is even a single MIH product that is worth talking about? Now what is Burrp? A bunch of reviews about places that may or may not be around/survive a year from now. So, what are we to do with all those reviews– store them in our history archives?
I humbly suggest that we all get back to discussing more important things like what Britney will do next to get on the front page;-)
Someone needs to bring sense into MIH and Ashish K :)
I guess they have way too much money to waste. I agree w/ Durani that there has to be a clear reason of acquisition. Burrp has neither traffic nor content. I have friends who have been requested/ paid by burrp to write reviews, though I know everyone does so. If reviews was a reason, then acquire mouthshut.
I heard that burrp has been going around for last few months trying to raise money from VCs but no one has been willing to put in any money as none see a possible route of making money – maybe MIH does :).