The veteran local information website UpMyStreet has hit a dead end after its surprise purchase last week by Zoopla.
Zoopla, which bought UpMyStreet for an undisclosed sum believed to be under £1m, has simply folded it into its own website.
Visitors to UpMyStreet, founded in 1998, are re-routed to Zoopla, where there is no mention at all of UpMyStreet and no sign that it will be integrated. Instead, the site was apparently bought for its traffic.
According to one website monitoring firm, Neilsen, it had 600,000 unique visitors in March. However, analysts Techcrunch said it had a tiny and declining traffic footprint.
Asked why Zoopla had made the purchase, a spokesman said: “UpMyStreet.com is no longer being operated as a standalone website/brand and has now been redirected to Zoopla.
“Our website and hence our advertising members will now benefit from all the extra traffic (over a million visitors a month) which is redirected to Zoopla, along with access to almost half a million new registered users.”
UpMyStreet was one of the first property websites in the UK and had a high profile during the first wave of the dotcom boom.
Like many, it ran out of money in 2003 and was on the brink of closure before being sold to price comparison website uSwitch. It changed hands when uSwitch was sold to EW Scripps in 2006, and then again to Forward Internet in 2009.
UpMyStreet had been a commercial partner to Zoopla for some time, supplying local information – for example on schools and local crime rates – to property searchers.
Comments
dpg rep came in yesterday he said dpg/zoopla deal being concluded in the next week.
I'm only paying Zoopla £25pcm. So if they put their prices up 10%, I'll swallow it.
Nice post. Greenlet
Shame, I think some people will miss it. Lots of customers liked it for researching an area and all that and how bloody frustrating when you try to find it and end up with a property portal?!
Im no IT bod but I agree with the posts below that they must have had a big lump of data or useful technology in the background that will surface soon as a service on Zoopla
They can put their fees up then.
Jonnie
And when all the sites are in just one name the numbers will drop back alarmingly no doubt as there are only so many serious lookers. I have some aquaintances who boast 'I go on Rightmove every day sometime several times' and they are not even in the market to buy.
Ought to get out more I say.
I'm starting to wonder if Zoopla is the Antichrist.
Surely the traffic that UMS generated was only there because of people searching for information through the search engines. I doubt that a large % of the traffic just open up a web browser and type in www.upmystreet.co.uk.
If the content from UMS is no longer available, surely the traffic from this site will be minimal because it will not be showing up in the search engine results??
They obviously owned some interesting and under or unused IP (intelectual property) that Zoopla worked out would help give it a boost against Rightmove.
The users are important no doubt, but they were probably Zoopla or RM users too.
It is possible that the historic data that UMS had is useful for the Zoopla "Values" bit.
“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” ― Henry Ford - Amazing he know about Rightmove
Surely cutting off the entire site and redirecting to Zoopla with no explanation will just confuse and annoy people who do not know of the take over.
Will Zoopla be providing the full same service as UpMyStreet did then?