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Owners take Vevo off the sales block after seeing growth


Vevo is off the block.

The owners of the popular music and video streamer have ended the sales process after deciding that the five-year-old property is poised for continued rapid growth, several sources told The Post on Monday.

Convinced of Vevo’s continued success, the owners — Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Google and the Abu Dhabi Media Group — decided in recent days that they’d prefer to keep their holding as is and ended all sale talks, sources said.

Vevo is one of YouTube’s top destinations for music, but houses a 24-hour over-the-top service called VevoTV that programs for a youth-oriented audience.

New York-based Vevo also has plans for a global roll-out.

The quartet of owners decided to retain their current ownership stakes after learning what content-oriented companies had in store for Vevo, which had 227 million viewers worldwide as of Dec. 31, one source said.

They realized much of that development could be done in-house, the source added.

“A lightbulb went off,” the source said.

The sale process had attracted the likes of DreamWorks Animation boss Jeffrey Katzenberg and digital investor Peter Chernin, as well as Liberty Media and Guggenheim Digital Media, among many others.

Vevo was launched in 2009 by Universal Music — then under the control of Doug Morris, who now runs Sony.

“We just watched this space explode and realized given how much traffic this gets on YouTube, along with the mobile play, this could be highly valuable,” said one source close to both companies’ thinking.

The most recent sales process was spearheaded by Goldman Sachs and Raine Group. An earlier sales process — also abandoned — was run through Allen & Co.

“Everyone is agreeing Vevo should be developed as a major entertainment platform,” one source said. “It has substantial momentum and has accelerating revenue growth.”

Vevo is the fifth-biggest destination on the Web, pulling in 43.5 million uniques — placing it just behind Google, Facebook, AOL and Yahoo!, according to ComScore’s July data, released Monday.

Vevo derives most of its traffic from YouTube, but sources said Rio Caraeff, president and CEO, has done a good job loosening its reliance on the No. 1 video streaming site by pushing its syndicated platform across the Web.

Vevo’s revenue in 2014 is expected to be around $350 million.