Jupitermedia Corporation (“Jupitermedia”) (NASDAQ: JUPM) announced today that it completed the sale of Jupiterimages Corporation (“Jupiterimages”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Jupitermedia, to Getty Images, Inc. for $96 million in cash.
Included in the assets acquired by Getty Images is the prized domain name Photos.com
Jupitermedia meantime announced that it will change its name to “WebMediaBrands Inc.” and its NASDAQ symbol to WEBM, effective February 24, 2009.
WebMediaBrands will continue to operate the online communities that were not sold to Getty Images.
These communities are comprised of Internet.com for IT managers and Web developers; Mediabistro.com for media, publishing and communications professionals; and Graphics.com for design and creative professionals. These three communities have a combined 22 million unique visitors and 70 million page views.
Getty said it would retain the Jupiterimages brand and Web site and integrate them with Getty Images using the domain Photos.com, which Jupiterimages has been using as a portal for low-cost stock image sales and subscriptions.
It will be very interesting to see how purchaser Getty ‘integrates’ the jupiterimages and gettyimages brands with the fantastic generic domain photos.com, especially given that both brands include the word images, and images.com remains a competing stock photos/images business.
The “new and improved” Photos.com website is TERRIBLE!!! They’ve added a bunch of cheesy lineart clipart from the late 1990s that no serious graphic artist would ever consider using. And they have totally stripped the search capability, which previously was very useful. I’m not sure what Getty’s long term plans are for this site. But they have taken it years backwards with the debut of the new site. My guess is that they’ll alienate most of the existing customers and go after a less sophisticated type of customer that doesn’t know any better. Shame on them. They paid $96M to destroy a perfectly good site and to dilute their corporate image.