New York-based About.com has acquired North Sky, an Orem company that provides free Web hosting services, for roughly $21 million in stock.
While operations of North Sky will remain in Orem with the same staff and focus, the acquisition will make About.com the 12th largest network of Web sites, as measured by Media Metrix Inc. Prior to that, About.com was ranked 17th.North Star has an unlikely birth in a most unusual birthplace in 1995: The Palace, a former dance club in Provo. Tim Stay, founder of Marketing Ally Teleservices, an inbound/outbound telemarketing company, hired a handful of "young Internet guys" to create Web applications for his company. Over time, that evolved into a Web site introduced in June 1998 as Freeservers.com. And as the name implies, Freeservers.com provides free Web sites to customers. But it has broken with tradition for assigning Web addresses, said North Sky CEO Hal Halladay. And that's part of its appeal.
"This was the first company to offer your name first in your Web address. The thought was, if you have a personal Web site, you'd like it to be personal." Like John.freeservers.com, for example.
The concept was popular, but clearly there are more than one Tom or Joe or Ruby. So Freeservers.com added a drop-down menu of choices that people could add to their names to create a distinctive Web site address (8m became very popular, as in Tony.8m.com.) Those personalized features as well as the tools to help those online build their Web sites led to phenomal growth. Last January, the company was responsible for 150,000 Web sites. Then it started letting people pick domain names that had personal meaning, like "BYUalumni," he said. "Something you have an affinity for, like a school or a professorion or hobby -- something you're a fan of."
From June 1998 to June 1999, a half-million free Web sites were created. Funding to operate the company came from the sale of advertising space on the Web pages. By September 1999, Media Metrix rated it 51st in terms of reach; in one month it attracted more than 3 million "unique" visitors and more than 80 million page views.
People liked the unique domain name branding system, which allowed a company, for example, to provide a domain name for the Web pages of its employees. And businesses or organizations were able to "scrub out freeservers" so that it could look like they were providing the Web site, which has been popular, too.
The two companies do very different things, so they won't be bossing each other around. About.com has been ranked by Media Metrix as the largest news, information and entertainment Web property in the United States. Its network includes more than 600 targeted environments, each overseen by a professional guide. "They are people who go out and find out about something -- say fly fishing," said Halladay. The guides learn about it, write about it and assemble directories of the best links, original comment, community features and more.
The big difference, Halladay said, is "Now we're funded. And we have a strategic partner, based in New York City, who has a lot of relationships and is very successful. North Sky is a complement to what they do."
Shares since the announcement was made have risen amid "buy" advice from several investment analysts.