$500 Million sale for AFF
Wow. Adult FriendFinder, the leading social network dedicated to sex, just sold. Actually, its parent company, Various, did. For $500 Million dollars. To Penthouse Media.
This was a bit of a tricky sale, I’d have to believe. For a while, it seemed as though AFF would be unable to generate a viable "liquidity event." The thinking was that a sex-based social networking site could never go public (this is probably still true). And Google, Yahoo!, and MSN would never buy it. And the major players in adult media wouldn’t buy it either – it was already too huge and would be too expensive. I’m honestly not certain why Penthouse bought them. I’ll take a look, but it’s possible that Penthouse had already tried duplicating AFF’s success and realized just how hard community is to get right. Or, they negotiated the price on AFF down from what it could have been worth if it had been, say, a dating-based social network ($500 Million for 260 Million registered users and 1.2 Million paying users could seem a bit low, compared to the $1 Billion bandied about for Facebook’s 50 Million users). Or perhaps the stars just aligned for AFF.
Either way, congrats to the good people at Various on the sale. Way to go!
