Sorry, didn't write this up on Friday. Emap Consumer Media has bought mobile firm Yospace for £8.7 million, plus up to a further £5.7 million depending on Yospace's operating performance in the next three years.
Yospace is the company behind 3 UK's See Me TV service, which lets users upload video clips from their cameraphones, and then get paid when other users download them. Emap hasn't said much about its plans for the company, other than it'll sit within its Emap Performance division.
"Coupled with Emap's marketing reach, brands, content and industry relationships, this acquisition will enable us to move forward in the fast-emerging mobile user-generated and video content market," says ECM boss Paul Keenan.
The deal has huge potential though, thinking about those brands. ECM includes magazines like Zoo, Grazia, FHM and Heat, along with various music TV channels.
It would seem like a no-brainer to launch a See Me TV style service based around individual brands (although I shudder to think what Zoo readers would come up with), while Heat could certainly benefit from some kind of citizen journalism platform (i.e. readers taking blurry snaps of Jade Goody in the local Waitrose).
But I wonder what scope there is on the TV side too, either for user-generated videos to sit within the existing content, or to form entirely new shows. Meanwhile, Yospace also has technology covering mobile blogging, which could have applications within a media publisher like Emap.