Posted by: Dalgar | Time: 12:46 am (PST) | Category: World of Warcraft
Breaking Story
The news in the rumor mill is that wowhead.com has been sold for $1 million USD to Affinity Media (at least used to own IGE, and still owns sites like Allakhazam, Thottbot, wowinterface, etc)
So - with Thottbot/Allakhazam owned by IGE, they pretty much owned the WoW fansite market (and thus a huge audience to push their wares to). At least, if it wasn’t for Wowhead. A late-comer, the site was an instant hit, with its clean UI and fast loading speed (think of Thottbot as Altavista, and Wowhead as Google). You can see on Alexa how Wowhead has grown while the others have stagnated.
And so ‘Affinity Media’ has struck again. Verified by three different sources, the price was confirmed at over $1,000,000. The lower limit was 1 million, while the upper was $1.5 million.
Quote from Tech Soapbox from Ahmed. More as it develops...
UPDATE 1: While at this time on paper Affinity Media has sold off IGE, it is unknown what the ongoing relationship is between Affinity and IGE or other virtual market providers.
UPDATE 2:
WoWHead has confirmed the sale:
News travels fast! We were hoping to have the time to put together a proper announcement about this, but it appears word is already out, so we wanted to acknowledge it: now that IGE is out of the picture, Wowhead has decided to become a part of the ZAM Network. We'll post a lot more information later today. Stay tuned!
Although Affinity Media claims to have divested itself of IGE, it's interesting that Brock Pierce doesn't give mention of this at the Virtual Goods Summit on June 22 according to an interview at Cnet
