Q&A site Answers today announced that it has acquired ResellerRatings, a site that calls itself “the web’s leading independent resource for helping shoppers find the best online retailers.” ResellerRatings currently features about 1 million reviews of just under 40,000 online stores. The site gets about 2 million monthly visitors who add around 1,000 new merchant ratings to the site every day. Answers CEO David Karandish says that his company acquired the service to solidify its “leadership in the fast-growing Q&A space and to help consumers find answers to whatever they are searching for online.” The two parties did not disclose the financial details of today’s transaction.
Answers.com And ResellerRatings: Online Since 1998
Both Answers and ResellerRatings are basically Internet dinosaurs. Both companies were founded all the way back in 1998 and both have been through numerous changes since. ResellerRating’s CEO Scott Wainner actually founded his first site, SysOpt.com, when he was just 15. He then sold that site and ResellerRatings to IT information provider web site EarthWeb (remember them?) for $4M in 1999. In 2002, after the dot-com crash and after EarthWeb sold all of its sites to Internet.com, Wainner bought his site back for a paltry $32,000 and, as he told us earlier today, “built it into a profitable company again without seeking funding.” Wainner is now joining Answers as General Manager of ResellerRatings.
Answers.com – which now apparently prefers to be called just “Answers” – itself was acquired by AFCV Holdings for $127 million last year (though some of its shareholder apparently tried to block the deal) and even though the hype around the site has long died down, comScore ranks it among the top 20 sites in the U.S. and top 50 sites in the world. According to its own data, the site currently features over 17 billion answers and registers over 10,000 new users every hour.
Answers Acquires Online Merchant Review Service ResellerRatings by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
