In a developing story, Liberty Media Corporation has announced today that they have acquired Bodybuilding.com, the bodybuilding industry's largest information and supplement website. Terms of the acquisition were not released by Liberty Media. But inside sources tell Muscletime that Liberty Media paid the DeLuca family and a private equity firm over $100 million for a controlling interest in Bodybuilding.com

Founded in 1999, Bodybuilding.com is a two time Inc. 500 Company and was named Internet Retailer "Best of the Web" top 50 in 2006 and top 100 in 2007. The company had over 100,000 daily and 3,100,000 monthly unique visitors in November, 2007.

"Bodybuilding.com is a fast growing leader in fitness nutrition e-commerce and the authentic voice of the bodybuilding community, as demonstrated by the success of BodySpace, the social network for body building athletes," said Michael Zeisser, Senior Vice President of Liberty Media. "We are pleased to welcome entrepreneurs of the caliber of Ryan DeLuca and his team into the Liberty family. We look forward to driving collaboration among Bodybuilding.com and Liberty's existing e-commerce and television companies.

"We are thrilled to join the Liberty Media family and to partner with their other top-notch commerce companies," said Bodybuilding.com CEO Ryan DeLuca. "Bodybuilding.com is a community-centric, search driven commerce business that is highly complementary with many of Liberty's other properties. We believe our strength in social networking and our well established brand relationships will be highly relevant to Liberty. We are committed to working with Liberty and its affiliate management to pursue numerous mutual, highly definable and actionable growth opportunities."

We do not know how the acquisition by Liberty Media will affect the sport of professional bodybuilding. Bodybuilding.com has been a major sponsor of bodybuilding contest nationwide and instrumental to the popularity of the sport especially in recent years with the free webcasts of major IFBB Pro bodybuilding competitions. We nor do we know at this point if Liberty Media will retain the same executive team that has been responsibly for Bodybuilding.com's meteoric rise!

UPDATE: Read our January 7, 2008 interview with Bodybuilding.com Founder and CEO, Ryan DeLuca. 

The DeLuca Family has successfully built this business as one of the fast growing companies in the United States. Ryan DeLuca has been the chief executive officer (CEO) since the beginning and family patriarch Russ DeLuca has been the treasurer (and regularly attending and participating in most IFBB Pro events).

Muscletime would like to offer its congratulations to the DeLuca family! In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this article has been a stockholder in Liberty Media Corporation (Nasdaq: LINTA, LCAPA) for the past few years.

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