Just after Barack Obama was elected to the White House, a website devoted to him got moved into Animal House. A few months ago, National Lampoon took a small flier into politics, buying BarackObamaJokes.com. On Wednesday, the day after America elected Obama to the nation’s highest post, the aspiring comedy conglomerate revealed that it had closed the deal. (Although terms weren’t disclosed, we guess the transaction cost National Lampoon less than $10,000.)
National Lampoon’s purchase of BarackObamaJokes.com continues its transformation from essentially a licensing business to a company with actual operations. It has done that largely through acquisitions, picking up a half-dozen Web humor sites so far this year. That flurry of dealmaking has pushed the ‘new media’ portion of National Lampoon’s overall revenue to 20%. The company plans to at least double that level within three years. (Incidentally, National Lampoon, perhaps best known for the film Animal House, is a publicly traded company. No joke. It currently sports a market capitalization of just $8m, but only trades some 9,000 shares in a typical day on the Amex.)
In the interest of a ‘fair and balanced’ account of our White House election M&A report, we also tracked down the guy who owns JohnMcCainJokes.com. The first thing he told us is that he also has a hand in HillaryClintonJokes.com and was going to register BarackObamaJokes.com, but ‘spaced’ on it. As for JohnMcCainJokes.com, which is little more than a placeholder, the owner says he hasn’t received any M&A overtures for the site.
National Lampoon’s 2008 acquisitions
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase
I like to hear that the Lampoon is coming back, and that thry are public, may as well own some.
[…] month ago, we wrote about one of the more unusual deals that we have seen in some time: National Lampoon picked up BarackObamaJokes.com just after the […]