Internet Brands doubles down on M&A

Internet Brands, Inc. (Nasdaq: INET) is essentially a holding company for a myriad of diverse websites. Some of the categories include travel, autos, and finance. Although, there are some commonalities: consumer focus, community, high engagement and compelling content.

The company went public last year and, for the most part, the stock performance has been lackluster.

However, with the report of its Q1 results, investors pushed the stock up 7% to $6.75 in yesterday's trading. Revenues increased 30% to $24.9 million and net income was $3 million or $0.07 per share. Moreover, adjusted EBITDA came to $7.9 million, up 35% over the past year.

While ecommerce revenues were light – primarily because of the slowing economy – there was still much strength from advertisers. Besides, Internet Brands has been quite active with M&A. Since the start of April, the company has purchased MySummerCamps.com and CreditorWeb.com.

As a result, the web properties of Internet Brands continue to rack up lots of traffic. For March, the total monthly unique visitors spiked 68% to 34 million and page views surged 89% to 458 million.

On the conference call, Internet Brands indicated that the M&A pipeline looks strong. In fact, with the soft environment, sellers may be more motivated to do deals. And, with $76.9 million in the bank, Internet Brands still has some firepower for transactions.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.