Internet Brands pays healthy premium for WebMD in otherwise ailing internet M&A market

Contact: Scott Denne

Private equity firms seem to be the only ones browsing for big consumer internet deals these days. Today’s acquisition of WebMD by Internet Brands marks the third billion-dollar purchase of a consumer internet company this year. The acquirers in those other deals, like KKR-owned Internet Brands, are also backed by PE firms.

Internet Brands’ $2.8bn acquisition of WebMD fits in the strategy, although not scope, of its past acquisitions. Since its days as Carsdirect, the company has rolled up 63 internet businesses across automotive, fashion and healthcare. Although the deal sizes of those were largely undisclosed, sites like dentalplans.com and racingjunk.com didn’t have the scale or notoriety of WebMD, and were certainly smaller deals – even Internet Brands itself was reported to have traded to KKR at just over $1bn in 2014.

In landing its biggest prize, Internet Brands paid a healthy valuation. At $66.50 per share, the deal prices the target company’s stock at a record level for the current iteration of WebMD (since its founding in the heyday of the dot-com bubble, WebMD has been through a couple of reorganizations, but has been trading on the Nasdaq since 2005). The acquisition values it at 3.9x trailing revenue, two turns above what Everyday Health – a competing health site that’s about one-third the size – took in its sale to j2 in 2016.

And while WebMD fetched a premium compared with its closest competitor, when compared with the broader market, it falls just shy of the 4.3x median multiple for similarly sized consumer internet deals across the last decade. As private equity firms account for an outsized amount of the consumer internet M&A market, premium valuations become harder to find. According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, $2 of every $3 spent on M&A in this category this year has involved a PE firm or PE-backed buyer, yet none of the $1bn-plus consumer internet deals this year – Bankrate, Chewy and WebMD – printed above 4x.

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