I've been suspecting for sometime that HitWise was fishing around to sell itself - or be acquired.  Somehow, I missed the news early last month that HitWise put itself up for sale; haven't heard if the HitWise was actually sold though.  According to Centerworks blog:

"…..The Telegraph (UK) is reporting that website monitoring firm Hitwise is up for sale. The asking price: $350 million. The Telegraph lists United Business Media and Experian as possible purchasers of Hitwise.  I could see many types of firms interested in Hitwise, including Google. Clearly this data is very valuable and worth a lot of money in future potential. I have used the tool for a couple of years and found it to be a better monitoring tool than say, Alexa. Is it perfect? Nope. Though using Hitwise will cost you a pretty penny.

The company, founded in 1997 by Australian internet entrepreneurs Andrew Barlow and Adrian Giles, has investment from Allen & Buckeridge and Insight Venture Partners. It has since moved its headquarters to U.S., to New York City. "

Here's the thing - is HitWise really worth $350 million dollars? Why should Google pick up HitWise when they could pick up Quantcast for a fraction of the cost (and Quantcast technology is more interesting than what HitWise is actually doing).

I will admit I have seen Hitwise digs in NYC recently, and it looks pretty fancy, like a news room, really.

To me, HitWise would be much more valuable if it could multiply it's clients tenfold while decreasing it's prices tenfold.  Pretty much, they'd make the same money but have a much wider user base and a brighter future if they did that.  I doubt they'd do that as they're marketing to the high end customer.  The problem is …. there are not enough customers who'll buy it.   

With a basic set of licenses to the full set of industry segments running between 40,000 - 60,000 a year (estimated price - I really don't know what the real prices are - I suspect they vary somewhat) I don't know how many clients they really can expect to get (1000, 2000, 3000…..)  

When you have an expensive product, like an Omniture or Visual Sciences roll out, you don't need that many customers because each roll out might run over 1 million dollars.   HitWise's products are not that expensive, but expensive enough to rule out most people who'd want to use it from buying the product.

Now, if HitWise drastically lowered it's price it would pick up many more customers (providing the marketing message was right) and would have a better shot and become a standard.  On the other hand, bringing the price down would be a big gamble.   However, if they picked up enough customers, they'd have a better chance of being aquired for more money, I feel.

But the other side of it, with Compete.com and Quantcast.com nipping at their heels, HitWise's products are beginning to become less and less competitive - meaning they have to sell soon, or else the price they can expect, I feel, is going to go down and it won't make sense to sell at all.

All this, by the way, is just speculation on my part.