CBS Acquires CNET Networks for $1.8 Billion

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.

Title should have been

[analog_line]

"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.

other Second Rate Site Acquired By Big Media

[illectro]

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.

Re:other Second Rate Site Acquired By Big Media

[mmkkbb]

Hein? Last.fm is not primarily a music streaming site though.

Re:other Second Rate Site Acquired By Big Media

[Hard_Rock_2]

Personally while the last.fm purchase was probably a bit overvalued (they all are), last.fm was actually a decent purpose considering that the site is actually really well done and it works. I think they deserved to get bought out and kudos to them. I had a look at the other music streaming sites in the article you mentioned and non of them seemed nearly as good.

That's not all they own...

[AutopsyReport]

I really wasn't aware how many domains CNET has. Did a bit of research and they own search.com, mp3.com, tv.com, radio.com, chat.com, etc. Those are some extremely valuable domains.

$734,464,000

[pcardno]

According to http://www.dnscoop.com it's worth $734,464,000.

Re:New name?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, Cnet was the Amazon of review websites.

Amazon? Have you read the reviews on tech products on Amazon? They're horrible.

As a former CNET employee, I can tell you that the editors and reviewers are not as tech savvy as you think. The reviews are mostly paid advertisements anyways.

And slightly off topic..

When referring to CNET, it's written in all caps. Not Cnet, or cnet or C|Net. It's pretty funny, we had posters in the breakroom that instructed us on proper usage of the branding and how to type out CNET.

Drink.com Beer.com Food.com

[tepples]

Going to a website called "news.com" for your news is like the products in the movie Repo Man [wikipedia.org] that were labeled "Drink", "Beer" and "Food".

Drink.com is parked. Beer.com is an online lad mag with beer reviews. Food.com is Food Network.