November 20, 2009
The day many of us have been waiting for (including Quinstreet) has arrived - the Quinstreet IPO. After years of speculation and some unanticipated market twists, Quinstreet announced its intention to go public, filing their S-1. Look for a more detailed post outside of this thread. For a company that has been incredibly secretive, the S-1 is an amazing look under the hood of one of the most intriguing companies in the online lead generation space. It details their acquisition history, and while many of us knew about their acquisitive nature, none would have expected it to include more than 100 purchases with at least four eight figure deals. The Quinstreet today is no longer an education lead generation business. They are a roll-up and have been a source of liquidity for countless smaller publishers who sites earn revenue through lead generation. And, today they are a diversified play with some large client concentration but only 50% of the business being edu.
April 25, 2008
Quinstreet update. The company has begun to invest heavily to expand
its operations into verticals outside of education. They have this year finalized two acquisitions, one in the home services sector and the other which gives them a foothold into insurance. The former is a pure play lead generation shop with rather higher barriers to entry, i.e. a strong deterrent for QS to try and build up internally. The latter is a marketplace but fits very well into their focus of owning and monetizing organic content. Companies names withheld at this time.
June 26 2006:
As one reader pointed out, it is now June, and no filing has taken place. The Advertising.com deal combined with the large percentage of revenue that came from University of Phoenix would seem to have played a role in the delay. The company has also struggled to break into mortgage, and I imagine any exit would require them to better diversify their earnings. While they have had sizable churn, they still have some strong talent. who, unlike other companies in this space, have the operational expertise that suggest they should pull through. I predict them trying to go public in Q2 2007.
11/11/2005 - (original post)
Quinstreet will file to go public in January 2006 and is on track to do more than $200 million in top line revenue for 2005. They've done well despite their draconian tactics, i.e., they have not won many fans in the industry.
On the acquisition front - Quinstreet has quietly purchased two companies. The first is Deep Star Interactive - operators of onlinedegrees.com, nursingdegrees.com, and nursing-schools.com among others. They have high page rank sites and receive quality organic search traffic. Purchase price between $3 million and $5 million. A great win for them.
The second is World Wide Learn, one of the best at organic search. Along with ClassesUSA and eLearners, arguably no company has a better grasp of SEO than they do (re: education). I believe the purchase price was around $8 million, which is a steal and quite a coup.
