SurveyMonkey acquires Zoomerang

SurveyMonkey is without any doubt the biggest online survey software platform. It is used by millions of individuals and companies. Until 2009, SurveyMonkey was operated by a handful of people. We have covered the acquisition of SurveyMonkey by an investor group led by Spectrum Equity Investors. Since then, SurveyMonkey acquired a number of smaller businesses. Now the saga continues, but with the acquisition of a big player this time: Zoomerang.

The news of the acquisition was released last month on SurveyMonkey’s blog. According to the press release, SurveyMonkey customers will experience no changes to their services. For Zoomerang customers, all their existing surveys will remain fully functional, including those embedded in websites or housed on third-party platforms such as Facebook. Their survey respondents will not see changes to the user experience, and there will be no need to redeploy existing surveys.

Financial details of the transaction were covered by Techcrunch and New York Times. To be able to acquire MarketTools, the owner of Zoomerang and few other products, SurveyMonkey partnered with TPG Capital. According to the New York Times, TPG will transfer some MarketTools assets to SurveyMonkey and take a minority stake in the service. TPG’s investment — which represents less than 10 percent of SurveyMonkey’s total shares — values the company at roughly $1 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal terms were private.

This move is definitely good for SurveyMonkey that consolidates the top position of the online survey software market. Their market share is huge now, as Zoomerang was their biggest competitor. We are far from a monopoly here as the online surveys area has dozens of other offers from a lot of survey software companies. But no one else is currently able to compete with them if we compare the number of user accounts for example. Online survey business Zoomerang has over 1.7 million users that will be added to the 9 million already utilizing SurveyMonkey’s core product. We will see how that will work our for these 10-11 million users, in the near future.

For more details about online surveys and survey software reviews visit http://www.survey-reviews.net.