Digital Window Acquires Buy.At
Gossip has been rife over recent weeks and chatting to a few industry contacts a whisper of a merger between two well know networks seemed to be the talk of the town. Today’s news that Digital Window has acquired the Newcastle based Perfiliate Ltd, better know to us as Buy.At, ended that speculation. This acquisition signals the formation of the UK’s biggest performance based marketing group. AOL purchased Buy At in 2008 for a whopping $125 million CASH!
What does this mean for affiliates?
An official statment sent to all affiliates signed up to Affiliate Window reads:
As existing affiliates of AW, you will see no change to the day-to-day service we provide. It will be business as usual, with the same desire to provide industry-leading service and technology to all our affiliates. There will be no change to the frequency or structure of your payments.
This deal will allow us to leverage the rich expertise in both businesses to deliver exciting and ground-breaking solutions for the market at a much more rapid pace. Digital Window solutions such as ShopWindow, Darwin, AWin Analytics, Snoopy and Agent99 will, over time find space alongside trusted Buy.at solutions like Offer Central, EventEngine, ProfitPlus and FlexTrack.
Exciting times. Watch this space.
Personally – I think this is a case of Awin using the takeover as a launching pad to get into the US. Buy.at already has begun establishing themselves state-side, with their Ticketmaster affiliate programme in particular proving very successful and creating waves in the US market. The tools are there, as is the talent at buy.at and it makes sense to piggy-back on that when AOL are desperate to sell any part of the company that they can make money from (buy.at being one of the few parts of the ‘Platform-A’ experiment that was turning a profit).
I think it was a mutually beneficial deal for both AOL (financially) and DW (strategically), with buy.at just going along for the ride.
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