MH Sub I, LLC dba Internet Brands is an American

new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

company based in

El Segundo, California El Segundo ( , ; ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Located on Santa Monica Bay, it was incorporated on January 18, 1917, and is part of the South Bay Cities Council of Governments. The population was 16,731 as of th ...

, United States, that operates online

media Media may refer to: Communication * Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data ** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising ** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...

, and

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

sites in

vertical markets A vertical market is a market in which vendors offer goods and services ''specific'' to an industry, trade, profession, or other group of customers with specialized needs. A horizontal market is a market in which a product or service meets a n ...

. The company also develops and

licenses A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

internet

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

and

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

applications.

Businesses

The company operates two divisions: consumer internet and licensing.

Consumer Internet division

The consumer internet division owns and operates more than 95 websites in seven categories. The company attracts more than 62 million

unique visitors Website popularity is commonly determined using the number of unique users, and the metric is often quoted to potential advertisers or investors. A website's number of unique users is usually measured over a standard period of time, typically a m ...

per month, with 97% of the audience originating from organic, non-paid sources. The company's strategy is to focus on specific target audiences that tend to be attractive to advertisers. On December 1, 2010, Internet Brands acquired AllLaw.com and AttorneyLocate.com, both founded by Arvind A. Raichur. SEC filings indicate that approximately 70% of the company's revenues are derived from advertising from more than 40,000 accounts—most of them

small and medium enterprises Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are businesses whose personnel and revenue numbers fall below certain limits. The abbreviation "SME" is used by international organizations such as the World Bank ...

. The company's portfolio of websites include many with

features:

social network service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

user generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

blogs A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

wikis A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

, and

internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

History

The company was founded in 1998 as CarsDirect.com, launched from the

business incubator Business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services starting with management training and office space and ending with venture ca ...

Idealab Idealab (formerly known as idealab!) is a startup studio based in Pasadena, California, U.S.A. History Idealab was founded by Bill T. Gross (not to be confused with the founder of PIMCO, Bill H. Gross) in March 1996. Prior to Idealab, Gross fou ...

. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to selling

cars A car or automobile is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of ''cars'' say that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people instead of goods. The year 1886 is regarded as t ...

"haggle-free" online, an approach it continues to employ. In 2000,

Roger Penske Roger Searle Penske (born February 20, 1937) is an American businessman and entrepreneur involved in professional auto racing and a retired professional auto racing driver. He is most famous for his ownership of Team Penske, DJR Team Penske, t ...

invested in the company and joined the Board of Directors. In 2002,

Time Magazine ''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on Mar ...

voted the site one of the 50 best in the world. The company changed its name to Internet Brands in 2005. The company's

IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

was in November 2007 on the NASDAQ exchange. INET was added to the NASDAQ Internet Index on March 22, 2010. Internet Brands agreed to be acquired for $640 million by the

private equity firm A private equity firm is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of startup or operating companies through a variety of loosely affiliated investment strategies including leve ...

Hellman & Friedman Hellman & Friedman LLC (H&F) is an American private equity firm, founded in 1984 by Warren Hellman and Tully Friedman, that makes investments primarily through leveraged buyouts as well as growth capital investments. H&F has focused its efforts o ...

in September 2010 and was thus delisted from NASDAQ. In September 2012, Internet Brands became involved in a legal battle with the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

(the operators of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

) over the future of

Wikitravel Wikitravel is a web-based collaborative travel guide based on the wiki format and owned by Internet Brands. It was most active from 2003 through 2012, when most of its editing community left and brought their contributions to the nonprofit Wi ...

's community. Internet Brands was acquired in June 2014 by KKR from

for 1.1 billion dollars. KKR is making its investment in partnership with Internet Brands chief executive officer Bob Brisco and the Internet Brands management team, who will hold a minority stake in the company and continue to run the business. In January 2016,

Intuit Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application Tu ...

Inc. announced an agreement to sell Demandforce to Internet Brands.

Controversies

vBulletin criticism

In October 2009, Internet Brands changed the pricing structure for its

vBulletin vBulletin is a proprietary Internet forum software package sold by MH Sub I, LLC doing business as vBulletin (formerly Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions). It is written in PHP and uses a MariaDB or MySQL database server. Similar produ ...

software, prompting complaints from registered users on the official forums. According to ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

'' those who complained were then banned from both the forums and from receiving support and updates, despite still having valid licences for the product. Internet Brands defended their position to ''The Register'' in a separate article; however, a later update to the same article stated that at least some of Internet Brands' claims were false.

vBulletin and XenForo

In October 2010, Internet Brands announced that it would file a lawsuit against the

XenForo XenForo is a commercial Internet forum software package written in the PHP programming language. The software is developed by former vBulletin lead developers Kier Darby and Mike Sullivan. The first public beta release of XenForo was released in ...

team claiming

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

; specifically that code in XenForo was based on vBulletin code,

breach of contract Breach of contract is a legal cause of action and a type of civil wrong, in which a binding agreement or bargained-for exchange is not honored by one or more of the parties to the contract by non-performance or interference with the other party ...

, and engaging in

unfair business practices Unfair business practices encompass fraud, misrepresentation, and oppressive or unconscionable acts or practices by business, often against consumers, and are prohibited by law in many countries. In the European Union, each member state must reg ...

. In November 2010, Internet Brands sued Kier Darby, a lead developer of XenForo, who had previously served as a lead developer for Internet Brands' vBulletin, claiming that Kier had not returned confidential information from Internet Brands regarding the vBulletin software. The XenForo team has denied the claims. In February 2013, the lawsuit was dismissed.

Wikitravel and Wikimedia

In 2012, after a lengthy history of dissatisfaction, community members at Internet Brands-owned website

began discussing whether to

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...

(split off) of their work and editing activities from ''Wikitravel'' and recommence their editing activities at another website host. The dissatisfaction related to long standing discontent at poor hosting, poor site updates, and excessive over-monetarization and advertising, and eventually, interference by Internet Brands in the community's activities in breach of prior agreements and understandings. Migration FAQ at Wikivoyage, 25 October 2012 Forking is a normal or anticipated activity in wiki communities and is permitted by the Creative Commons license in use on sites such as Wikitravel, and the wiki software used by Wikitravel included the facility to take 'database "dumps"' for that purpose. This mirrored the fork of the German and Italian language Wikitravel communities some years earlier, which led to a new travel wiki site called

Wikivoyage Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has ...

. Members of the communities concerned decided that the community at Wikitravel would move its editing efforts to merge with Wikivoyage, to create a new travel wiki to be hosted by the

, the owner of

and a large range of other

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

reference sites based upon a wiki community. The merge and move were endorsed by the editing community, but opposed by Internet Brands who litigated against two users it accused of unlawful actions related to the proposal. The allegations were strongly rejected by the individuals and the (non-party) Wikimedia Foundation who stated the case was an example of a

SLAPP Strategic lawsuits against public participation (also known as SLAPP suits or intimidation lawsuits), or strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with t ...

lawsuit intended to deter and frustrate lawful conduct. On November 19, 2012, the claims by Internet Brands were dismissed by the

United States District Court for the Central District of California The United States District Court for the Central District of California (in case citations, C.D. Cal.; commonly referred to as the CDCA or CACD) is a Federal trial court that serves over 19 million people in Southern and Central California, m ...

Greenlight Financial Services

In April 2013, on behalf of its client Greenlight Financial Services, Inc., the Rhema Law Group won a jury verdict trial against Internet Brands, Inc. The Orange County Superior Court jury found that Internet Brands breached a previous settlement agreement between the parties and awarded lost profits damages in the amount of $750,000.

Model Mayhem

ModelMayhem.com is a social media website where models can create profiles and publish pictures. In May 2008 Internet Brands bought Model Mayhem from the original developers Donald and Tyler Waitt. Model Mayhem was involved in the court case

Jane Doe No. 14 v. Internet Brands, Inc. ''Jane Doe No. 14 v. Internet Brands, Inc.'', 767 F.3d 894 (2014), is a 2014 ruling at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals over the legal liability of an Internet service provider for criminal offenses committed by its users. The ultimate ruling ...

, where litigants argued that Model Mayhem was liable for damages resulting from crimes committed by users on the website.

References

External links

* {{authority control Mass media companies established in 1998 American companies established in 1998 Online mass media companies of the United States Technology companies based in Greater Los Angeles Companies based in El Segundo, California Kohlberg Kravis Roberts companies 1998 establishments in California 2007 initial public offerings Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq 2010 mergers and acquisitions 2014 mergers and acquisitions