Bronte Media

Congrats to Will Hodgman and Seamus McAteer who have sold M:Metrics to comScore for $44m. The transaction marks another Jup alumns doing well story.

For some background. Jupiter Communications merged with Media Metrix in June of 2000. Seamus was a senior guy at Jupiter and headed up the wireless division. Media Metrix acquired AdRelevance the year before, which Hodgman had founded.

Then Jupiter Media Metrix fell on hard times, and the Media Metrix division was sold off to comScore for pennies on the dollar and the Jupiter part, which I worked at, was sold for.. well just pennies to Alan Meckler (who has since sold it to a publicly listed private equity firm).

McAteer and Hodgman founded M:Metrics four years ago and will now join comScore Media Metrix as senior managers.

From what I can work out from the filing, it looks like they both got around $3-4m each and also another $500k in restricted stock that vests over four years.

And the venture guys look like they all have earned satisfactory returns too. It’s hard for my simple mind to work out exactly how much but it looks like the series A investors got more than triple their money, series B investors a little less than double and series C investors an 11% return.

Prism Venture Partners, i-Hatch and The Kantar Group owned roughly 70% of the company and had kicked in roughly $18m.

Keep in mind to factor in the time value of money and the investors’ expected returns (20%+ IRR). Not a home run but a seemingly profitable deal nonetheless. Also, I have no idea what liquidation preferences might have changed, my analysis is just off a simple share count and a comparison to their corresponding entry price per share.