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By the Numbers #7

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Commentary on some of the interesting numbers in the news

bythenumbers

(Photo credit: Flickr/morebyless under CC-BY 2.0)

$135M

If their bid is approved by the bankruptcy court, Univision will buy Gawker Media for $135M. The only other bidder, publisher Ziff Davis, made an original offer of $90M prior to Univision winning the auction.

Due to bankruptcy protections, Univision will acquire Gawker free of debt or ongoing liability associated with the Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) lawsuit. Bollea was awarded $140M in damages, and though that decision is being appealed it is notable that the sale of the company does not cover the current lawsuit liability. On top that shortfall, Gawker also has $22M in secured debt that is payable prior to paying unsecured creditors like Bollea.

This acquisition allows Univision to continue diversifying into digital channels. The company has shown increased appetite for content creation, as evidenced by their recent 40% stake in The Onion, which lends to the appeal of adding Gawker to their portfolio.

This purchase also helps broaden and diversify the Univision target audience. Univision estimates they have “83 million average monthly unduplicated media consumers across all platforms”, whereas Gawker properties are estimated to have had 56.1M unique visitors in July.

11.6%

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince recently shared that number of IPv6 addresses connecting to their service outnumbered the IPv4 connections in June.

I was curious as to how this related to global IPv6 adoption, and it appears that CloudFlare users are further along the adoption curve than the broader population. Google’s IPv6 statistics show that the global adoption rate is only 11.6% as of August 12, 2016. This rate varies significantly across national borders. The United States is higher than average with an IPv6 adoption rate of 29.5%, though it lags substantially behind Belgium, who is leading the world with an adoption rate of 45.2%.

When the co-chair of Belgium’s IPv6 council was questioned about their causes of their success, he offered a variety of explanations that ranged in levels of plausibility. While I am somewhat more skeptical of the role of culture and demographics, their network address translation (NAT) constraints and corresponding shortage of IPv4 addresses seem like reasonable drivers.

$3.3B

Pending regulatory approval, Wal-Mart will acquire Jet.com for $3.3B. The acquisition will be paid for over time with $3B cash and $300M in Wal-Mart stock. The companies intend to maintain distinct brands after the acquisition.

The acquisition marks Wal-Mart’s most recent attempt to actively compete against Amazon’s dominance in the e-commerce space. These efforts also include offering a two-day shipping subscription service and a string of logistics and transportation investments.

Wal-Mart has a lot of ground to make up in the online retail space. Wal-Mart’s 2015 e-commerce sales totaled $14B, which reflects just 3% of their total revenue. Though Wal-Mart has declined to comment on Jet’s revenue or profitability, Jet is projected to have had $1B of sales in their first year of operations. Even with the acquisition, this puts them well short of Amazon’s $99B in 2015 retail revenue*.

* Note that the reference for Amazon’s 2015 revenue links to the company’s generic Annual Report page rather than specifically to the 2015 Annual Report. The direct link automatically downloads a PDF, and I assume everyone finds that as irritating as I do. 🙂

Disclosure: AWS is a RedMonk client.

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