Jupitermedia has great assets, a long history and is still run by the founder, Alan Meckler, who built the company from the ground up. As of this writing JUPM is at 45 cents a share, which values the company at only $16.25 million. It appears that there is no rational reason to explain this low valuation except that there are apparently very few investors interested in the stock.
Jupitermedia founder, Alan Meckler
[Disclosure: I own shares in Jupitermedia and have since I was employed there in 1998-2000. My opinions here are purely my own and I have no current inside knowledge about the company.]
Jupitermedia owns in my opinion the best domain the Internet has produced, internet.com. With the company severely undervalued by the market, I believe they should re-brand Jupitermedia as internet.com again. The company had its greatest success under this brand and could use this name recognition to remake the company as the great B2B content network it was.
This is not to say that Jupitermedia still does not produce great content, because it does. However, the buzz that internet.com was the Internet’s next Cnet.com and the place to go for internet business and tech content has been somehow lost in the shuffle of their growth and focus over the last few years.
It’s obvious that the image market (which Jupitermedia is currently a top three player in) has proven very difficult. Micro image sites that sell images for a dollar or less have commoditized the image economy and this has taken the growth out of the digital image industry. In the long run, this division of Jupitermedia needs to be sold, spun off or otherwise separated from their content side.
I have seen suggestions that Jupitermedia ought to change its name to mediabistro.com, after the site was purchased for $23 million a short fourteen months ago. I think that would be a mistake that would serve to lower their name recognition, not raise it.
A name change to internet.com, on the other hand, would have huge name recognition from the start and would tell its advertisers and its site visitors that the business and tech content giant is back and roaring!
Let me know your thoughts on this below…
