Buying Doctors.net.uk and fixing the overseas template (2011)

What it means to buy a membership list

The core of this decision was not the size of the cheque but what the cheque bought. Of the $22.6M (¥2bn) acquisition cost, the assets taken on amounted to a little over ¥200m; all the rest was goodwill. M3 made a purchase that inherited almost nothing recognisable as an accounting asset, and made it as its first overseas portal acquisition. What it bought was a list of doctors and the reasons they came back to it every day — an email address on the site’s own domain, the position of being the one site that opens through a hospital’s network restrictions. The base it had spent eight years building from scratch in the United States, it took on in Britain with thirteen years already in it.

A membership list, though, is not valued once and for all at the moment of purchase. Whether doctors keep gathering there depends on how the business is run afterwards, and the goodwill amortises against profit every year for twenty years. In practice, impairments overseas surfaced repeatedly from the year ended March 2024, after the pandemic boom receded. Taking in platforms already complete on the ground and binding them together is a realistic way to build a membership base across borders — and equally a mechanism that keeps asking whether each of the things bound together can earn on its own. What M3 chose in 2011 was to take on both.