CBS is buying purchase CNET and Conde Nast is expected to announce on Monday that it’s buying Ars Technica, the technology blog. The acqusitions are the latest moves by established media companies to use acquisitions to solidify their stakes in the new media business.
I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that we’ll see more buyouts like these in the not-so-distant future. With Internet advertising growing in double digits, media companies would be dumb to pass up the opportunity. All of it is good news for freelance writers. Why? Who would you rather get an assignment from, a well-heeled multimedia giant or a start up? Granted CNET’s no start up, but you get the idea.
CBS will pay $1.8 billion in cash for CNET, which got its start as a tech business news service during the first Internet boom in the mid-1990s, and today runs a collection of computer, gaming, parenting, food and other Websites (Disclaimer: I briefly freelanced for CNET in the late 1990s.). It’s CBS’ first big online media purchase, and the Tiffany Network got it for a steal: $11.50 a share, a fraction of the $80 a share CNET’s stock was worth before the 2000 dot-com meltdown.
Conde Nast is paying $25 million for Ars Technica, and according to news reports, will fold it into Wired Digital, the online counterpart of Wired Magazine. Conde Nast bought Wired Digital in 2006, the same year Wired Digital acquired Reddit, the personalized social news aggregation Website.