Scoot is a United Kingdom

business directory A business directory is a website or printed listing of information which lists businesses within niche based categories. Businesses can be categorized by niche, location, activity, or size. Business may be compiled either manually or through a ...

website. It was one of the highest profile casualties of the rise and fall of internet companies during the

internet boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

at the beginning of the 21st century falling from a value of £2.5 billion in 2000 to £5 million in 2002.

History

The origins of Scoot began in March 1993 when businessman

Nigel Robertson Nigel Patrick Robertson (born August 13, 1962) is a British entrepreneur and businessman, best known as the founder of FreePages plc (later renamed Scoot.com). Nigel was included in the 2005 Sunday Times Rich List and Monaco's Rich List in 2007. ...

bought the

freephone A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefi ...

number 0800 192 192 from

British Telecommunications BT Group plc (trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, broa ...

for an estimated value of just £100. Robertson had spotted the potential of acquiring a freephone number similar to BT's own

directory enquiries In telecommunications, directory assistance or directory inquiries is a phone service used to find out a specific telephone number and/or address of a residence, business, or government entity. Technology Directory assistance systems incorporate ...

number of 192. BT spent three years trying to recover the number in legal battles but were finally forced to admit defeat in May 1996. Robertson and his business partner Jonathan Bushby renamed their company (then known as Timeload) as FreePages and set itself up as a rival directory enquiries service a few months later. In February 1996 the firm was listed on the AIM stock market following a

reverse takeover A reverse takeover (RTO), reverse merger, or reverse IPO is the acquisition of a public company by a private company so that the private company can bypass the lengthy and complex process of going public. Sometimes, conversely, the public compan ...

of Blagg plc. In 1998 Robertson stepped down as

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of FreePages and sold out of the company, leaving it under the direction of Robert Bonnier, a Dutch financier who had joined FreePages in February 1995. Bonnier renamed the company Scoot, and the firm began to aggressively promote itself with television advertising in the UK and a link-up with French media giant

Vivendi Vivendi SE is a French mass media holding company headquartered in Paris. Widely known as the owner of Gameloft, Groupe Canal+, Havas, Editis, Prisma Media, Vivendi Village and Dailymotion, the company has activities in television, film, video ...

to promote itself in Europe. In June 2000 it purchased classified advertising newspaper Loot for £189.9m. However, the company failed to reach its hoped-for user numbers and ran out of cash. Following heavy losses in the first half of 2001, Bonnier quit as chief executive in June 2001. The European side of the business was bought out by Vivendi, its major shareholder, and in August 2001 the company was forced to sell Loot, its only profit-making business, to

Daily Mail and General Trust Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) is a British multinational media company, the owner of the ''Daily Mail'' and several other titles. The 4th Viscount Rothermere is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the company. The head office is ...

for £45m in order to raise money to keep going. In June 2002 the company, which had told its creditors it would run out of money by the end of the month, sold the bulk of its UK business to BT for £5 million - just two years previously the company had been valued at over £2.5 billion. The remainder of the business reverted to its original name of Timeload, but less than a year later it was acquired by the Coe Group, a video surveillance company. In 2005, Enable Media Ltd acquired a 20-year licence from BT to operate Scoot, with its 2,500 local advertisers, for a rumoured £10m. BT maintains an economic interest, based upon future revenues. Enable Media was bought by

ITV ITV or iTV may refer to: ITV *Independent Television (ITV), a British television network, consisting of: ** ITV (TV network), a free-to-air national commercial television network covering the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islan ...

in 2006, for £3m, to expand its local broadband TV service. It had revenues of 3m. In 2009 they sold Enable Media to Touch Local Ltd. In 2014 Touch Local (including Enable Media which owns the Scoot brand) was sold to US company

web.com Web.com Group Inc. was an American company headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida that provides domain name registration and web development services. Established in 1999 by Darin Brannan, the company was known as Website Pros Inc. until early 2 ...

References

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External links

Scoot Official WebsiteBusiness Trade Centre
Web.com Online marketplaces of the United Kingdom