Intuit In Talks To Buy Mailchimp For More Than $10 Billion (bloomberg.com) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks software, is in talks to buy email marketing firm Mailchimp for more than $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. No final decision has been made and discussions could fall through, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn't public. Another buyer could also emerge for the company and others are interested, they added. The deal would unite two providers of services for small businesses. Intuit has offered QuickBooks accounting software to clients for decades, supplementing it with services such as Credit Karma, which it acquired last year. Mailchimp is focused on digital marketing services, including social advertising, so-called shoppable links and automation products. [...] If talks are successful, it would be the largest deal to date for Intuit, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Who? (Score:1, Troll)
And I mean that concerning both of them. Who the hell is Intuit, and who is mailchimp? And why the hell would either be worth 10 billions?
Is it me or does money not really have any reasonable value anymore when you go past a certain threshold? A million, a billion, a hundred of either, it's all kinda interchangeable.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's telling you how valuable the tracking of people has become.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Funny)
-Good on You.
Re: (Score:3)
Intuit makes TurboTax and Quickbooks, the most used tax and accounting software. Mailgimp? Who knows. Sounds like something Intuit could have developed in-house for a fraction of the cost.
Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
Mailchimp is a service that will spam your customers for you.
A kid with an Internet connection could figure out how to spam e-mail in about half an hour. The value of mail chimp is all the e-mail addresses they have, and the consent they have to send spam to some of them.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Inuit is pretty big. They make QuickBooks and TurboTax. They mae a huge amount of money off them.
As to why MailChimp [wikipedia.org] would be worth 10 billion dollars. Well they are a leader in email marketing, with 700 million (2019) in revenue. Which is pretty good for a company with about 800 employees.
I would have never guessed that MailChimp was so successful before looking them up just now, but they make a lot more sense financially than many other web companies. At least they have a business model with customers who actually pay for services and don't just live off advertisements.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
They also were Inc.'s 2017 Company of the Year [inc.com].
They're a pretty impressive little company. Growing revenue year after year, and most important of all is that, unlike all the new tech companies and unicorns coming public via IPO, Direct Listing, or SPAC, they're profitable. And they've never taken a dollar from a venture capitalist or any outside investor.
May the two original founders have decided they want to retire, or do something else, after 21 years running and building up the business?
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Intuit runs TurboTax software. They exist to charge you a fee for what the government does for free. They also pay the government a lot of money to keep the free part quiet.
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Re: (Score:2)
Intuit sells tax preparation, bookkeeping, and accounting software to individuals, small businesses, and other organizations. I used Quicken to manage my checking account back in the day, and later used Quickbooks for bookkeeping when I was the head cook and bottle washer of my computer store. I'm now retired into a simpler life and find a spreadsheet to be adequate. Many churches, clubs, and charities use Quickbooks.
MailChimp is a mailing list handler used by a lot of churches, charities, clubs, etc, for
Re: (Score:2)
> Who the hell is Intuit, and who is mailchimp?
Ranting about the irrelevance of old technology companies from... ...slashdot.
Irony score: 8/10. Well done sir.
Argh! (Score:1)
Mailchimp has been awesome from the beginning. Sucks that an asshole company like Intuit would come along and ruin it.
Time to find a substitute.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
i get mostly spam from mailchimp. that is not awesome.
Custom ads ahead... (Score:2)
Take the leader in transaction tracking, and a near requirement that you upload those transactions to Intuit, and mix with an e-mail marketer that'd love to have more info on its audience... definitely we've got a new GoogleDoubleClick forming.
spam (Score:3)
In 2021 spam email is worth 10 billion. Personally, I block all of those bulk email services. If you rely on a spam service like mailchimp to contact me too bad for you.
What these spam services are missing is a common database of bad actors. Instead bad actors just bounce around these services and act with impunity.
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Well at least mailchimp has a straighforward process to unsubscribe, plus you can check "I never subscribed to this list". Not sure if they are doing anything with that information however.
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I don't think Mailchimp does anything with it, it's mainly the list owner that sees this, far as I can tell.
Re:spam (Score:5, Interesting)
In my experience, Mailchimp definitely does something with that information [organicweb.com.au]. I've seen client accounts suspended before. Mailchimp is definitely not the most frictionless service to use if you want to load up rando lists and spam them.
I once saw a client account get suspended because they hit a threshold of unsubscribes on a send. Thing was - that client was mailing their own employees! They were chimping because they wanted to try getting statistics on opening/etc for the messages, and use the tools for managing the mail content and personalization.
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That's good then, the list I was running with 20k+ subscribers didn't seem to generate much attention, although we got like 1 spam unsubscribe every couple weeks, so maybe it was under their threshold.
I feel like I've tried this unsubscribing from lists that I suddenly found myself on, and felt like nothing happened there too, so my experience hasn't seen much from it, but glad if it is at least.
Re: (Score:2)
Each customer and each campaign are treated independently. These services do not combine customer lists. An unsubscribe is for a single campaign - a bad actor could add me to new campaigns all day long and leave me to play whack-a-mole. Complaints are simply passed through to the spammer, there is no global control on these services where one can be blocked in the entire network. So, I do the blocking at the SMTP level, where mailchimp gets 5.7.1 Not Authorized response from my server.
Mail Chimp? (Score:2)
How is Mailchimp worth that much?! (Score:2)
I guess it's just because of the monopoly (there aren't many other options for email newsletters these days). But I don't get how it could be worth so much.
The editor is total crap. If you want to send out text (rather than a bunch of image blocks) it's such a nightmare to work with. Want to cut and paste text? All the formatting goes wonky. Okay, so copy it into notepad first to eliminate any formatting - still it manages to mangle it in some way or another.
They have some different 'templates', but even th
This is a good thing. (Score:2)
Email Marketing == Spam (Score:2)
If a company sends me more than the information pertinent to a transaction, I consider that spam. Ordering something does not mean I want your newsletter. No amount of whitewashing is going to fix that.
Why? (Score:2)