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2014 will go down in history as the game-changing year for Viewpoints, an 8-year-old consumer reviews site led by CEO and founder Matt Moog. Just yesterday Moog announced Viewpoints' acquisition of San Francisco-based PowerReviews as a result of an antitrust case filed over a year ago.
Here's how the serendipitous deal went down: Austin-based Bazaarvoice, a big Viewpoints competitor, bought consumer review provider PowerReviews for over $150 million in May 2012. Shortly after, the Department of Justice began investigating Bazaarvoice for lessening market competition - and by January 2013, a case was filed requesting Bazaarvoice to sell its PowerReviews assets.
Fast forward to March 2014 when Viewpoints submitted a bid to purchase PowerReviews for an undisclosed amount. Now that Moog has signed a letter of intent to buy PowerReviews, Viewpoints will gain 22 employees, a San Francisco office and more than 20 million consumer reviews once the deal closes (compared to its current standing at less than 1 million consumer reviews).
This isn't the only notable 2014 achievement for the Viewpoints team though. The January launch of Viewpoints' new customer review software called Pulse, which allows companies to collect and manage customer reviews on their own sites, is setting the industry pace as "a living, breathing, jumping-off point for a conversation between consumers and brands," Moog said in a January interview.
Although the past few years have been a power struggle between these three competitors, River North-based Viewpoints now has a fighting chance to come out on top in the consumer reviews and product ratings space.
Disclosure: Matt Moog is the Chairman and founder of Built In.
