AOL acquires MMAFighting.com

AOL has acquired MMA news portal MMAFighting.com, with the site to be merged into its Fanhouse sports network.

MMAFighting.com covers the increasing popular sport of mixed martial arts, and includes a mix of blog like news elements, sport rankings, pictures and video. The site has an Alexa rank of 52,454 and does monthly traffic in the 800,000 to 1 million page view range according to direct measure stats on Quantcast.

Marty Moe, SVP for AOL Money & Finance told Paid Content that while AOL was enthusiastic about the acquisition, the buy was not a signal of a wider plan to acquire sites for AOL for the sake of it, contrary to speculation. “We are head-long in the content publishing business, we’re actively looking at what other opportunities might work for our sites” Moe said. “We’re taking a category by category approach to acquisitions and we’re actively engaged in exploiting market opportunities.”

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, although AOL did say that it intended to retain most of the sites writers.