Top Ten Reviews Publisher Ready to Grow, Triple Revenue in M&A

(Bloomberg) -- Special interest publisher Purch Inc. expects to buy or merge with a rival to triple revenue from $120 million, said Chief Executive Officer Greg Mason.

"Now we’re in the mindset of doing more transformative-style M&A, where we buy an entity that might be as big if not bigger than what we currently are," Mason said in an interview at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. He declined to provide details about possible combinations.

Among the areas the company’s looking at expanding into are finance, health and home services, like security.

"We are always looking at acquisitions of new sites that can help us fill in gaps that we might have in editorial coverage," Mason said. The New York-based company, which publishes sites including Top Ten Reviews and Tom’s Guide, makes money by providing high-quality readers -- those with an intent to make a purchase -- with their product reviews.

Purch did eight deals in 2015 and 2016, and none in 2017. The company’s Ebitda margin is around 10 percent now, and should be in the 20s within three years, at which time the company may be big enough to go public.

Purch also licenses its ad technology, a business it expects to grow by between 30 percent and 50 percent over the next few years, Mason said. Licensing the ad tech is Mason’s countermove to a publishing industry that relies on a "dead" CPM business model.

In an era when unboxing new products has become a phenomenon for millennials, spending hours upon hours surfing the internet, Purch is looking to scale. The private equity-backed publisher produces approximately 250-plus videos a month across its portfolio of editorial brands.

To contact the reporters on this story: Christiana Sciaudone in Sao Paulo at csciaudone@bloomberg.net, Kamaron Leach in New York at kleach6@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Arie Shapira at ashapira3@bloomberg.net, Christiana Sciaudone, Sebastian Silva

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