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CBS Acquires CNET Networks for $1.8 Billion

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 15, @10:25AM
from the aggregation-to-the-nth-degree dept.
The Media Businesses The Almighty Buck News
An anonymous reader writes "According to an announcement made today by Neil Ashe, CEO of CNET Networks, CBS has acquired CNET Networks. "Today, CNET Networks announced that it has been acquired by US media company CBS, in a deal valued at $1.8bn. The agreement represents an important strategic step for both companies and should be completed by the third quarter of 2008." So guess we'll be seeing The Late Show with Dan Ackerman, Molly Wood in Hollywood and CSISpot." If you'd like to read about it someplace other than CNet, Ian Lamont contributes a link to coverage at The Standard. It seems reasonable to ask how much longer they'll let news.com remain an IT-centric site.

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Firehose:CBS to acquire CNET Networks for $1.8 billion by Anonymous Coward
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CBS Acquires CNET Networks for $1.8 Billion 25 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • New name? (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Thursday May 15, @10:26AM (#23417756)
    And the new company is....CnetBS?

    • Re:New name? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Thursday May 15, @10:51AM (#23418068)

      CnetBS?
      I think they decided to cut out the unnecessary letterage and just call it BS.

    • Re:New name? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by abolitiontheory (1138999) on Thursday May 15, @11:51AM (#23418790)

      And the new company is....CnetBS?

      Haha... *tear*. Am I the only one who is actually sad about this? I lose faith in new media outlets when they partner with old media. I know Cnet is big and corporate anyway, but it's like your favorite local supermarket chain being bought out by the big, national one; you know worse service and product quality is on the way, all in the name of (supposedly) lower prices.

      For me, Cnet was the Amazon of review websites. Sure it was big, it was corporate, but it provided solid baseline advice on pricing and advice, along with user reviews and links to other websites or places to buy the product. Compare that baseline with a little in depth search on fan sites and blogs, and you were sure to find the easily accessible deal on the net. Cnet could be trusted, in the same way Amazon could/can be trusted.

      This is another MSNBC monstrosity. No one trusted them from the first, but Cnet is losing respect in my eyes and my chances of going there will dimish as the months of incorperation with CBS increase. This rings like I imagine a major network partnering with Amazon would. I would lose respect for the beauty of a purely "new world" portal of information and services, feeling like it was sold out to old world profit motives and corporate greed.

      Old networks are trying to "stay relevent" but they are only dead anchors on sailing ships of new technology. When has this kind of partnership helped? An example of a good acqusition was Google/YouTube, being that they were both new world technologies with distinct advantages for each other. Old media is just trying to keep their hands in the money pot, and as they become more irrelevent, they start to make grand, flailing gestures like this, much like the record companies and RIAA.

      This smacks of the same way Microsoft "innovates": buying companies which have technologies they can quickly repackage and sell off as their own. CBS brings nothing to this merger. They are acquiring a relevent, new world technology and are going to suck it dry, purely in their best interest. Unless they stay fairly hand-off and simply siphon ad revenue, Cnet will go down the drain and become another "made over" new world technology no one (informed) cares about.

      Anyone have suggestions for other broad-base review websites I can start visiting?

      Technorant, out.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by stewbacca (1033764)

        For me, Cnet was the Amazon of review websites.
        Cnet is always good for a study in how to NOT conduct unbiased reviews, complete with high Dell ratings AND Dell advertisements right on the same page!

        Their car reviews are especially bad, not from a biased sense, rather from an it's-obvious-the-nerd-w

      • abolitiontheory wrote, "For me, Cnet was the Amazon of review websites."

        Well, for me, CNet was the Matlock of review websites: all the action was pretty slow-moving, there were ads everywhere, and they never tried to scare you with something you hadn't see

  • news.com domain valuation ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 (739875) * on Thursday May 15, @10:28AM (#23417778) Homepage
    I wonder if there was internal discussions in the buyout about how much the domain news.com was worth as I can certainly see that being attractive to CBS.

  • Title should have been (Score:5, Informative)

    by analog_line (465182) on Thursday May 15, @10:36AM (#23417896)
    "news.com" domain name sold for 1.8 billion, because that's what it really boils down to. Sure, they get a portfolio of websites that get a lot of eyes and I would imagine a fair amount of dollars, but everyone knows how fickle that can be in today's world. CBS's news divsion is at the bottom of the pack of major US news networks despite the Katie Couric hire, which was supposed to get them back on track. This sounds like a similar ploy, the bulk of C-Net being sweetener to the "screw the news division, it's not a profit center" investors.

  • Amazing. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Steauengeglase (512315) on Thursday May 15, @10:37AM (#23417900)
    I didn't realize that CNET had $1.8 Billion in office furniture. That is what they are buying it for, right?
  • Maybe CBS is trying to get hip with the youngsters. This is a network that has been know for the last 20 years as the ancient relic network. They've actually had several "60 Minutes" hosts die in the middle of news segments recently without anyone even noticing. Poor Andy Rooney has been dead for several years, and they still cut to his rotting corpse at the end of each show.

    They really NEED some modernization over there. Granted they will have to explain the concept of the "internet" to many of their staffers, but hey if they can learn to use a telegraph, they can learn the internet too. And maybe someone on a CNET forum can tell them about Andy.

  • ...we'll soon C even more BS about the NET?
  • Canadian Security Intelligence Service ... + pot? c'mon, I expect that in the netherlands, but in canada? We're still working on legalizing it!

  • Why should I care? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Thursday May 15, @10:39AM (#23417940)
    Yay, I guess... or maybe boo? Meh? Whatever.

  • other Second Rate Site Acquired By Big Media (Score:5, Informative)

    by illectro (697914) on Thursday May 15, @10:40AM (#23417950)
    CNet has been struggling recently and that valuation seems too high, but traditional media have a bad habit of paying too much for aqcuisitions of tech companies.... Comcast Acquires Plaxo, even though nobody can figure out how to make money [techcrunch.com] AOL Acquires Bebo (popular, but not enough to justify almost a billion dollars [valleywag.com]) CBS (again!) Acquires last.fm (popular among bloggers but eclipsed by other sites [wired.com] in the real world) the only big media deal I can think of in recent years that was a good bet was Newscorp's undervalued' acquisition of myspace.

  • Sigh or Yeah? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by failedlogic (627314) on Thursday May 15, @10:45AM (#23417986)
    In the early 90's when there wasn't much else on the Internet for download sites, I used to go to Download.com to find shareware for Windows, CNet for product reviews and news. And yeas, there are a bunch of other umbrella sites under CNET. Frankly the only one I ever found of any use is GameFAQs. Over the years, the quality of those sites has decreased. There are many other sites I will chose over the CNet sites. So, I wonder if this is really a wise move for CBS. They've had a great history in journalism and now they've bought a site with not much in-depth or useful information. So this will either mean that the brand will either get worse (if CBS just wanted News.com and doesn't care for CNET or mismanages) or better (CBS will have an impact on the journalistic side and bring more quality material).

    Its interesting to see this from another angle. Dan Rather gave a speech (if I recall at Duke ... iTunes U), and he discusses CBS's history and how the company (among others in news reporting) didn't get into the Internet right away. Perhaps this is seen as buying into the Internet experience and (obviously) adding technology reporting to its side. I don't watch MSNBC but I'd have to think that its more or less the same there.
  • I think the last time I happened to hit a CNet page was back in 2002 or 3, which is about the last time I watched CBS-TV.

    Both those huge "studios" are better off producing content that's syndicated and embedded into smaller, more precisely targeted outlets

  • Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whisper_jeff (680366) on Thursday May 15, @10:48AM (#23418030)
    Seriously, I remember playing Shadowrun and Cyberpunk as a kid (ok, not a kid, but a long time ago...) and thinking the idea of megacorps running the world was nice for a fictional view of the future.

    Apparently it wasn't so fictional with all these multi-billion dollar mergers of mega-media corporations, manipulation of political agendas by corporate interests, and whatnot.

    Where do I sign up for my cybernetic implants because I know how this story goes and I want to have a fighting edge when things go bleak...

  • TV.com (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Roblimo (357) on Thursday May 15, @11:11AM (#23418300) Homepage Journal
    CNet also owns TV.com -- surely that domain name, too, is of value to CBS.

  • CBS News needed technical assistance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Brett Buck (811747) on Thursday May 15, @11:33AM (#23418582)
    The next time they create "fake but accurate" documents, they will be far more plausible!

              Brett

  • CBS is buying a team, not a website (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mckinnsb (984522) on Thursday May 15, @12:16PM (#23419198)
    CBS is buying much more than just a few (highly valuable) domains and websites with the acquisition of CNET - they are buying a highly trained technical team that has experience serving huge amounts of data to many users at once across multiple domains targeting many different interests. Which is of course, essentially what CBS wants to do, except they took a long time getting into the internet. To be completely honest they would have been better off making this purchase a few years ago.

    This isn't to say that CBS doesn't already have a talented technical team, but I would place my bet on CBS planning to expand further into the internet realm. They probably realize that the future of their medium is tied heavily to the internet, and are making strides to ensure that they will be able to deliver their content over the internet seamlessly in the future. Even accounting for team attrition after acquisition, acquiring an entire company at once is probably much easier than a long term hiring process, especially for a company as large as CBS which has already hesitated too long.

    CNET also has a blog that , while not extremely well known, is frequently perused by JavaScript and web developers- Clientside. I haven't visited Download.com in a long time, but I visit Clientside nearly every day for examples , reference, etc. I'm a little worried about its fate(considering that the author could leave always leave CNET after the acquisition), but I hope it survives. It's also a good example of the talent behind CNET- there are some good programmers there, for sure.

  • Address of the future news.com (Score:4, Funny)

    by jettoblack (683831) on Thursday May 15, @12:36PM (#23419504)
    Assuming CBS wants news.com for their own news portal site, the current CNet computer & tech news portal will be moved to a new, easy-to-remember address: com.news.com.com

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