British property listings site Zoopla has bought the veteran local information website UpMyStreet, the two companies announced early on Friday — in a deal that appears to mark the end of the road for one of the UK’s oldest web brands.
Zoopla, which is itself in the process of undergoing a merger with Daily Mail’s Digital Property Group, said it was a “natural fit” given the existing commercial relationship between it and UpMyStreet — which provides a database of localized information and service listings.
Already, visitors to UpMyStreet are being redirected to Zoopla, and it’s not clear how the site will be integrated in.
We’re trying to find out the size of the deal, but a source with knowledge of previous Zoopla acquisitions suggests that the way UpMyStreet has simply been redirected suggests it would be relatively small — certainly lower than £1m.
Techcrunch points out that the site itself has had a tiny, declining traffic footprint — which probably makes it an acquisition of data and staff at best.
It’s been a long, tricky road for UpMyStreet, which was founded in 1998 as one of the original local data services and proved a breeding ground for a number of now-prominent folk in the British tech industry.
After making a name for itself through the first dotcom boom, the site ran out of money in 2003 and was just about to close down when it was purchased by price comparison website uSwitch — which itself was sold to EW Scripps in 2006 and then again to Forward Internet Group in 2009.
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