Updated with the correct sale price: Disney (NYSE: DIS) has bought out IdealBite, a small green-living online media company based in San Francisco, we have learned. The price is around $15 $20 million (corrected after I got more information), our sources say, and the acquisition was completed a couple of months ago.
The site was founded in 2005 by Heather Stephenson and Jennifer Boulden, dedicated to “making lives a little greener through simple and practical ‘bite’-size tips,” as how the company describes it. Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group, a big believer in tips-and-email-based media (DailyCandy, Thrillist and others) took a stake in it last year.
This is among a string of acquisitions Disney’s new corp dev group has been working on, with a specific mandate of making some smaller acquisitions in the online space not necessarily related to the core of the Disney properties. These new acquisitions are not housed under Disney’s digital media group, but left to grow on their own. We reported last week that Disney is in the process of buying Fanlib, and was close to buying DigiSynd...now we have learned that the DigiSynd acquisition just closed so it is official.
