Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Business
Mark Sweney

After Bebo could travel networking site Where Are You Now be worth £100m?

Just days after AOL dropped the bombshell that it had stumped up $850m for "local" success story Bebo and lo' and behold social media travel website Where Are You Now? admits it could be on the market after receiving several approaches. According to reports Wayn has fended off several approaches, AOL is meant to have been one "interested" party , and now on the back of claiming around six million monthly unique users - a quarter of Bebo's - could it really potentially be worth around £100m?

There is a certain whiff of opportunistic PR around Wayn's "revelation" on the weekend that it is to conduct that old chestnut of a strategic review using investment bank Lazard.

That is not to say that Wayn isn't in the right neck of the woods at the right time.

Founders Peter Ward and Jerome Touze, who launched the website back in 2002, have pushed the right buttons for decent media coverage thus far.

Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com fame is non-executive chairman and Steve Pankhurst, the founder of the slightly faded British success story Friends Reunited, invested seed capital early doors.

Still according to comScore, which pegged back Bebo's global audience claim from around 40m to a monthly unique user number of around 22m, Wayn's has a global audience of 3.1m unique users per month.

And only 340,000 active monthly unique users in the UK.

On that basis the numbers game would put Wayn's price tag at around the much more palatable £58m mark. Maybe.

That is assuming that someone - a travel company? - wants to mine the travel-meets-networking niche.

Which still would be a coup for a couple of lads who supposedly started the website after returning from a round-the-world trip with something like £40,000 in debts.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.