UNITED ONLINE PURCHASES SITE SERVICE PROVIDER SPENDS $10 MILLION FOR WORLDWIDE SOCIAL NETWORK.Byline: Brent Brent, outer borough (1991 pop. 226,100) of Greater London, SE England. The area is a rail and industrial center. Its manufactures include automobile parts, clocks and watches, and electrical equipment. Hopkins Staff writer WOODLAND HILLS - United Online Inc. spent $10 million in cash to add a worldwide network of users to its portfolio Monday. The company, known mainly for its NetZero and Juno online service providers, purchased Massachusetts-based Opobox Inc. and its subsidiary The Names Database The Names Database is a controversial social network, owned and operated by United Online, the parent company of Classmates.com, with headquarters in Orem, Utah. Unlike most social networks, it requires that new registrations include five email addresses. . The social networking site A Web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or just to "hang out" together. Members create their own online "profile" with biographical data, pictures, likes, dislikes and any other information they choose to post. , www.namesdatabase.com, serves as a private clearinghouse uniting 20 million registered users worldwide. United Online intends to integrate its purchase into its Classmates.com subsidiary, which tracks users by school and allows them to seek out old acquaintances online. "If you want to reconnect with someone you went to school with, served in the military with, worked with, we can do it," said Mark Goldston, United Online's chairman, president and chief executive officer. "You pretty much have to be hiding under a rock somewhere for us not to find you." The site seemed particularly enticing to Goldston because of its large international base. While Classmates' users are mainly domestic, he said namesdatabase.com members come largely from other countries and sign up at a rate of nearly 10,000 per day. This makes it dually attractive to United Online. Though its new purchase doesn't bring in lots of revenues - it's projected to gross less than $1 million this year - it gives the company a huge base to use as a market for its Internet access See how to access the Internet. , voice-over Internet protocol See Internet and TCP/IP. (networking) Internet Protocol - (IP) The network layer for the TCP/IP protocol suite widely used on Ethernet networks, defined in STD 5, RFC 791. IP is a connectionless, best-effort packet switching protocol. and photo- sharing services. "This is an advertiser's dream, because you've got consumers who are telling you exactly what they're looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. ," said Todd Richmond, a research fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication who's studied the rise of online social network groups. "This is like 20 million focus groups right there. I don't see a better bang for your buck from an advertising standpoint The Standpoint is a newspaper published in the British Virgin Islands. It was originally published under the name Pennysaver, largely as a shopping-coupon promotional newspaper, but since emerged as one of the most influential sources of journalism in the than going with the online sites." brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com (818) 713-3738 |
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