• by Paul Gough , January 6, 2004

FindWhat.com announced Monday that it had completed the acquisition of Miva Corp.

The Fort Myers, Fla.-based company said it had purchased Miva for $8 million, which included $2.7 million in cash and about 165,000 shares of FindWhat.com common stock, which is publicly traded on the Nasdaq market. FindWhat.com is also assuming about $2.5 million in liabilities from Miva, the company said.

The acquisition completes a transaction that had been made public in early September. It also gives FindWhat.com a foothold in e-commerce services for small- to medium-sized businesses, which is Miva's specialty. Miva provides an online platform that includes ready-to-use software that gives smaller businesses the ability to connect e-commerce and marketing services.

Craig Pisaris-Henderson, chairman and chief executive officer of FindWhat.com, on Monday afternoon credited Miva with building an impressive application and client base since the company began in 1996.

"They've really developed a robust solution for small- to medium-sized businesses," said Pisaris-Henderson. "The Miva application is plug-and-play [for clients]. We feel it's going to fit in very nice" with FindWhat.com's offerings.

FindWhat.com connects consumers and businesses through online marketplaces, where online advertisers pay a per-click fee for their advertisements that are distributed on Lycos.com, HotBot, and other sites like Search.com, Excite, Webcrawler, MetaCrawler, and Dogpile. Pisaris-Henderson said that the Miva acquisition will allow FindWhat.com to connect to the smaller businesses that may not have been able to afford higher priced, more complicated pay-for-performance and e-commerce applications. Plans call for the FindWhat.com's advertisers to have the opportunity to use e-commerce shopping software, plug-ins, modules, and hosting services that Miva has developed. And Miva clients will be able to promote their Web sites through FindWhat.com's networks.

""We intend to leverage what they've already created with the Miva brand and integrate" with FindWhat.com's services, he said. While FindWhat.com declined to be specific about how much overlap there had been prior to the merger between the clients of FindWhat.com and Miva, Pisaris-Henderson said it wasn't a lot.

"We were very surprised at how minimal [overlap] there was. Very surprised," he said.

Miva will operate as a division of FindWhat.com, but will continue to be based in San Diego. Joe Austin, who until the merger had been the president and chief executive officer of the privately held Miva Corp., is now general manager of FindWhat's Miva division.

On an unrelated acquisition note, FindWhat.com said that there had been no progress to report on merger talks with British-based Espotting Media Inc. On Dec. 24, FindWhat.com said the two companies had amended their merger agreement to extend a deadline for a possible transaction. The sunset date, which had been Dec. 31, was extended to Jan. 31, 2004.

FindWhat said it hoped to reach a decision by the end of the month.