14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo!'s recent change on its travel information (including pricing) site has pretty much shook that part of the industry. FareChase, the travel site promoted by the Sunnyvale based company, was forced on the market by its biggest competitor's buying of Sidestep.
Probably seeing that there is room for one more big player at the table, AOL is currently considering buying the British Where Are You Now? (WAYN) site for the same amount of money Kayak made the transaction that got Yahoo all scared.
As reported by Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK, "Social travel site WAYN is allegedly in talks with AOL over a possible $200m sale to the consumer portal giant. A spokesperson for the UK startup denied that any sale talks are taking place. However, I have tonight spoken to three well-placed sources who have all independently quoted the $200m figure to me, and named AOL as the prospective buyer."
The company says that it has somewhere around 9 million registered users and counted 3.6 million unique users worldwide in November, the last month comScore.com released numbers for. I mentioned Kayak earlier as one of the reasons this deal might be in the cooking. As a matter of fact, WAYN is currently doing business with it and a good portion of its revenue is coming from there.
The site is pretty well done and the demographic it's targeted at is clearly young and mobile, but the way that it managed to gather so many users from all across the world might be counted as a mystery. Some say that it used the old scheme with spamming email and frankly that must have been the case or else the numbers are completely made up. No way in such a short time it could have brought together 9 million, that's a boom comparable to Facebook's.