Marchex Acquire Pay Per Call Company VoiceStar in $28m Deal

The pay per call advertising service VoiceStar been been bought by the local advertising company Marchex in a $28 million deal.

The terms of the deal are as follows:

“Marchex total anticipated investment to acquire VoiceStar will be $28 million, consisting of approximately $20 million in transaction consideration and $8 million in company investment. Specifically, transaction consideration consists of approximately $12.9 million in cash consideration and Marchex will issue approximately $7.1 million in restricted stock that is subject to vesting over two-and-one-half years from closing to certain employees of VoiceStar; and company investment consists of $8 million relating to products, infrastructure, human resources and other items through 2008. The acquisition is expected to close by October 1, 2007.”

VoiceStar is a company that helps advertisers track the success of their advertising campagin. VoiceStar sell their customers a block of phone numbers for $10 each month per number. Each number is unique and unique to each advertising camgian. VoiceStar monitor the calls so the advertising knows how successful each individual campagin was.

VoiceStar helps track how effective your newspaper and online advertising campaigns are at generating calls to your business. To do this, they sell advertisers a block of phone numbers ($10/month/number) to be placed in news papers or on websites. Each number is unique to an advertising campaign and can be linked through a softswitch to your existing phone lines.

As of February 2007, VoiceStar had 400 clients with over 20,000 individual advertisers working through those clients. Other competitors in this business include Ingenio, eStara and Google has also done some work in click to call.

What do you think of VoiceStar being acquired by Marchex?

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