Steve Case’s Lime to Be Squeezed Into Lifestyle Portal
AOL Founder Sells Company to Gaiam
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 8/7/2007 4:25:00 AM
Eco-focused media company Lime, majority owned by AOL founder Steve Case, has been acquired by Gaiam, a “green living” media and e-commerce company.
New York-based Lime will be incorporated into a new site to be launched by Gaiam, to be launched this fall. Terms of the acquisition, announced Monday, were not disclosed.
Lime was created as a multiplatform, environmental TV programmer in late 2005 after Case’s Revolution investment firm bought Wisdom TV.
In February, Lime pulled the plug on its 24-hour TV channel, which had been in about 7 million homes through carriage deals with Comcast and EchoStar Communications, to focus on broadband and cable video-on-demand.
“When we got involved with Lime almost three years ago, none of the major media companies were focused on sustainability, and we saw an opportunity to launch Lime as an independent media brand,” Case said, in a prepared statement. “Now that the ‘green’ movement is becoming more mainstream, we concluded it made sense to participate in the creation of a unified LOHAS [lifestyles of health and sustainability] community and platform with our longtime partner Gaiam.”
Gaiam sells about 10,000 products and has approximately 8 million direct customers, to whom it distributes 20 million catalogs per year. The company’s home media products are carried by almost 70,000 retail stores in the U.S.
Lime.com has about 2.2 million unique visitors per month, and Lime’s 1,000 hours of video content is available through some cable VOD.
The Gaia.com portal will also incorporate Zaadz, a social-networking site with 85,000 members, and Conscious Enlightenment, which offers a “socially conscious” credit card, publishes two magazines and operates two yoga-oriented Web sites.
Gaiam (pronounced “guy-um”) was founded in 1988 and is based in Broomfield, Colo. The publicly held firm reported revenues of $219.5 million and net income of $5.6 million for 2006.
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