Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M | Hacker News Reader

Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M

wsj.com

109 pointsaaronbrethorst121 comments

I know it goes against the HN ethos to just bitch about paywalled articles being shared on the regular, and that upvotes sort it out, and that if they still go to the top is presumably because the core audience already subscribes to these publications. And still, I can't stop myself from wanting to flag all such articles on account of thinking about HN as an open and free site that should allow everyone to consume content equally, without having to resort to these schemes like internet archive, browser extensions and other workarounds.

No matter what publications will tell you, introducing advertising will - to an extent - corrupt the journalistic process.

Is this something you’re okay with, or does reporting just not have financial worth to you?

You know what else corrupts the journalistic process?

Going out of business.

I personally feel that this is sort of a bullying tactic. These people go to school spend hours creating content. They employ journalist, editors and web admins to bring quality articles to the masses.

Its one thing to support free/opensource software and encourage it. It is another to force it on creators. If someone doesnt want to offer their articles for free or their software for free that should be respected. It shouldnt be hacked around and forcefully (obvriously not in the assult manner) taken.

Instead of pirating software or copying content how about you write your own article. Dont force your ideals on others.

Pay walls suck but the least we can do is watch some ads. I dont use ad block because youtube is worth something to me. And if this wsj is not worth the signup then I should just go without.

An interesting feature idea would be to allow there to be multiple links for a given article topic, and allow upvoting and downvoting on the particular links, without having to submit new links that are not obviously related to the same story (and do not share comment threads, etc.).

This might lead to a little bit of confusion over particular points made in one of the articles, but it would be balanced against the accessibility of other news sources, and would give us a way to organically work free of blog spam.

Ten years ago or so, I'd occasionally read the print version of Time. It was a serious magazine full of in-depth articles. These days, from looking at their online presence, it seems to have mostly devolved into BuzzFeed and news spam for social media. What happened?

What happened? The economics of media we're reshaped entirely by the internet. In print, people buy your content and adds in a giant bundle. You get money upfront AND you sell dozens of ads all at the same time. You can produce diverse content because there's plenty of room in that magazine, so have some in depth thought pieces, some witty stories, and some pretty ads and everyone will be happy.

On the internet there's a ridiculous amount of content available completely for free. You don't ever buy content because why would you? All you have to do is click on what you want to read and it appears in front of you with some ads which you'll ignore 99% of the time.

That 1% is significantly less valuable than what that old print ad space was worth, but it still has value. So the entire game becomes centered around that click. So the company tumbles in value because no one will buy print and no one clicks on headlines which don't indicate something that will absolutely captivate their attention.

So the company is steadily becoming worth less and less, and in order to squeeze out some revenue and stay afloat you have to target those clicks, or should I say, bait those clicks.

I know you probably asked "What happened?" rhetorically, but this is what happened and if you were in the same position running the company, you'd probably make the same decisions or go out of business 6 years ago. I agree that it's unfortunate, and we all need to find a way to support in depth journalism.

Well, you and everyone else stopped reading the print edition 10 years ago. That's what happened.

Somebody actually got me a years subscription to Time magazine about 10 years ago. I never read it. It was awful.

The thing is, lots of magazines have fantastic content. They just don't have it at a volume sufficient to fill a whole magazine every month.

I have a stack of Wired for example - early Wired in particular every now and again had fantastic articles. But the ones I've kept are from many months apart, and each one of them I've kept for one article.

A magazine like Time with the reputation time has, tends to have that reputation because of the occasional articles and images that are outstanding enough to be remembered, and because their baseline quality is high enough not to detract from the successes, not because everything is consistently good.

In print publishers got away with that. People would read it because they often had no competing content available pre ubiquitous internet (most of my remaining paper magazines were bought for transatlantic flights). Online, if the articles don't draw in enough eyeballs, it serves little purpose.

Maybe once upon a time but I feel increasingly that online competition is increasingly being used as a scapegoat for declining editorial standards. The rise and fall of publications is a natural cycle. There’s no reason at all why Time should continue immortally, it’s just a trademark at this stage.

If i were a billionaire who was interested in magazines, i would buy up as many as possible and have the staff write in the genres they want to write in about each topic and then just let people to subscribe to each vertical channel they want...

I’d argue even 10 years ago the quality of Time was questionable. One of my friends was interviewed on chiptunes by Time at around that time due to a success of a Kickstarter for a Miles Davis chiptune album he did, and the editor twisted his statements of love for creating songs with that production quality into something he disliked - he contacted Time about the mischaracterization and they refused to change it until he started a Digg posting blasting the atrocious journalism, upon which they agreed to change the article...which still contained the writer’s clear bias against it, but not as insidious as was originally written.

Ever since that incident, I’ve been very skeptical of Time articles, and if I do read them, I read them very carefully with my friend’s experience in mind.

"skeptical of Time"

Time?

This is how the entire media works.

Some are credible, some are not.

They all spin.

It's a rough game for them, there aren't enough interesting things going on frankly. The world would be fairly boring were it not for the 'adaptive' way in which we tell stories.

Now with their new subscription model, publishers like the New York Times are getting more money directly from regular people instead of corporations, so they no longer have to please their corporate masters. The past 10 years were some of the darkest years in the history of the media because publishers were totally reliant on corporate funding. Now (very recently) what we're seeing is a reversion to the old model of newspapers being paid for by the people who read them. This is actually what news is supposed to be but we forgot because the past 10 years have messed with our heads.

I am not sure that helped in this case. Hyperbolic "fake news" claims aside, I have observed a marked, and downward, shift in nuance when NYT covers most hot-button issues. I find myself looking for other sources first now. They just seem to have created a self-funding bubble. I find it unfortunate, as a majority of their reporting is still stellar.

All news is fake to some extent.

I think that so-called 'fake news' is good because it allows people to expose themselves to two extreme opposite views.

If people want to live in a filter bubble then they can go ahead and do that but it's nice to at least have the option to see alternative views.

I think that there is often a grain of truth behind fake news. If people feel that they're getting screwed over by the system and then an article comes along and tells them "you're getting screwed by the system, this is why...", even if the reason is a poorly researched guesstimate, it's still much more useful in terms of driving social change than articles that just say "the economy is booming, low unemployment all around, everything is great...".

Nytimes has gotten too liberal. They are alienating all the Americans that don’t live in big cities. Their anti Trump agenda is also too obvious.

The ONLY time I ever pick up a print of anything (newspaper, magazine etc.) is while traveling, if I don't have enough juice on my devices, or don't have wifi etc. And if the mags/ papers are free.

That said, I do prefer reading printed versions of text books and maybe some novels.

There’s a couple of magazines I pick up every month purely to support their journalism. Paying for news is kind of like Patreon at this stage, but it’s also nice to have something in the canteen for us to lead through over lunch.

You would support them a lot more by subscribing.

I do subscribe to one or two actually.

Just reading their Google headline proves your point - looks more like CNN or Fox News:

TIME | Current & Breaking News | National & World Updates

The other thing that has changed in 10 years is that you are 10 years older and 10 years wiser. Time was always kind of populist. It's a picture/newsmag. Essentially credible? Sure. But not exactly highbrow. Try reading the articles from 10 years ago again see what you think.

I thought it became BuzzFeed for baby boomers stuck in medical(ish) waiting rooms? My 70 something year old dad gave up his subscription a while ago

That's hardly a fair comparison. Buzzfeed news is a legitimate news organization that often performs highly valuable investigative journalism, whereas Time is for kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TT81o4hL4c

Until BuzzFeed News differentiates themselves from their vile clickbait roots, they will continue to not get respect. I am not sure this is unfair, even if it is unfortunate.

$190M? Wow. Here’s 15 personal yatchs worth more than Time Magazine: https://www.alux.com/worlds-most-expensive-yachts/

Not sure about worth, they cost more.

Actually it's worth. Cost is different to value. Cost relates to expenses. Buying an asset is not an expense, while the ongoing maintenance and depreciation of it would be considered an expense.

Yachts depreciation is huge as people who could pay that much don’t tend to buy used without heavy discounts. So, he was right cost new says little about current value.

Worse for the manufacturer, it’s unlikely for anyone to want the same design without heavy modifications should the original buyer become insolvent.

Cost is the amount of money originally paid for the item, or the amount to replace. Value is an expression of utility. Many expensive things have average utility, and so aren't worth their price.

Generally if something costs more (and have been sold at said cost), it's because someone thinks it is worth that much.

At the time of sale sure, but try selling your five year old car for original sticker price.

If it's something like a Bugatti Veyron, sure, why not? Surely these superyachts fall into that category?

Only if their is something specific about it that makes them noteworthy. Generally people are buying yachts to be used and they really do age.

PS: You can buy a used Bugatti Veyron for below initial sticker price even ignoring inflation. https://www.dupontregistry.com/autos/listing/2006/bugatti/ve...

Yachts are a hole in the water into which you pour money. They are fun, but the sea doesn't care about your wish for an asset.

I hope he steers the ship more to the center. This weeks issue is a puff piece on Nancy Pelosi, complete with flattering cover picture.

Actually he's not planning on being involved editorially.

> He said in a statement that "Lynne and I will take on no operational responsibility for Time, and look only to be the stewards of this historic and iconic brand."

-- https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/16/media/tech-ceos-buying-news...

Easy to say, difficult to verify.

And also easy to want now, but difficult to continuously keep wanting in the future. Kind of like going to the pub for just one pint.

The best way to kill a publication is to interfere with its operation.

Time Magazine seems to have had no problem killing itself without owner intervention.

Also maybe the only chance of saving it.

What opinions are emblematic of the center?

I have always felt that "center" was less a matter of the specific opinion positions* , and more a matter of the style of discourse, or the degree of nuance presented about the varying opinions for a particular topic. That may be just my personal feeling on the word, but I have had people agree with it over the years.

*Though obviously extremes can be identified, e.g. advocating violence against $GROUP_NAME is not especially "center" in the current US context.

Interesting. I'm trying to picture that, but I'm not sure if I can. To me, that sounds more like how people arrive at a position rather than the position itself. Or, how someone comes to the content of their opinion as opposed to where on the spectrum that opinion might be.

So I am using the word "center" instead of "moderate" intentionally, because the latter might not exist--at least not in the way the common use of the word "moderate" suggests. There is some research (will dig up and edit this post if I can find it) that demonstrates how most moderates do not exist in the way we imagine. The study I am thinking of explains how surveys often use naive averaging on a single axis for policy preferences, and wind up labeling people with a mixture of extreme views as moderate. Meanwhile, those individuals are anything but moderate on any single, specific issue.

Instead of "moderate", what makes someone "centrist" to me is when someone is the opposite of "dogmatic", when someone has an ability to look at the other side and see how a logical path can be walked to reach another conclusion (than their own). Even if that person does not agree with the specific conclusion, they can follow the "stack trace". And what this understanding gives them, what this ability to reason about the other side gives them, is the necessary preconditions for compromise.

That is center to me: ability to compromise. Opinions are not center. People are center, or centrist, if they possess the disposition and non-dogmatic stance necessary for compromise. Barring revolutionary upheaval, every opinion needs to be implemented in policy eventually, and policy details involve compromise more often than not.

Maybe I am splitting linguistic hairs, but that is how I hear the word "center": a place where people with a level of understanding can come together and compromise. Compromise, famously, being an arrangement where neither side fully gets what they want.

EDIT: Found the paper, and if you want a TL;DR look at Table 1: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...

The BBC comes to mind, although they're not a perfect example. They have a mandate to present both sides of an argument (hence Nigel Farage got so much airtime in the run-up to the EU referendum).

That said, ask anyone in the UK and they'll always tell you that the BBC is "biased" against one group or another, so the way they actually present those arguments varies. But at least they get a mention.

In U.S. discourse the concept of a political "center" can generally be reduced to the concept that nobody is advocating for anything that's really all that different than things are now. Or to the extent that they are they are advocating for slow, incremental changes. "Common sense, bipartisan solutions" and so on.

Thus, in practice, centrism is in fact a political philosophy that advocates for corporate hegemony and income inequality. Those are current major societal trends, so by definition any approach advocating no major changes serves to perpetuate those trends.

Other major societal trends include outrage culture and hyper partisan behavior. I see the "center" as being against those things more than they're pro corporate hegemony and income inequality (obviously).

Those two points of view are the same point of view.

People are outraged because society is becoming profoundly unfair. People have different takes on why it's unfair and who is getting the worst of it, some of which fall under some kind of definition of "left" or "right" but the basic force causing the outrage is that our social contract has been systematically dismantled.

Those who did the dismantling, and have benefitted from it, of course, are not outraged. But all the people yelling and angry scare them. So they're opposed to that. Welcome to centrism.

I disagree. Outrage culture comes from social media. It became profitable (in attention points) to create and ride waves of outrage. I've yet to see a mob go for the 0.1% for having all of the money, it's always some shallow drama or an easy pc win.

Everything in moderation.

Don't start wars but be able to defend yourself.

Balancing caring for people with economic realism.

Being pragmatic about cherrypicking policies from both sides of the capitalist and socialist political spectrum - for example nationalised rail but privatised phone providers.

Not holding limiting beliefs that align with either current right/left politics - i.e. support abortion rights for women but also Christian employees to openly wear crosses and pray at work.

Here's a policy that everyone I've ever spoke to who describes themselves as a centrist has believed is a good idea - non-violent prisoners shouldn't be sent to prison but should have to work in recycling centers improving how much gets recycled instead of put into landfill or burned for a longer period than the equivalent prison sentence would be. After all why should they cost the public whilst in prison when they could help the environment?

Everyone I know who describes themselves as a centrist might not agree on everything the other does but we largely agree on 75%+ of policies because they tend to be seemingly common sense when we talk to each other.

> Everything in moderation.

Including moderation?

Especially moderation ;-)

Nice thought but Benioff is a liberal, so this seems unlikely.

What is the definition of liberal here? Liberal is often right of center.

Also, Nancy Pelosi seems solidly center-politics and Benioff is a capitalist billionaire. If anything they are both boringly conservative in outlook.

Indeed, time to stop giving right wing politicians like Pelosi so much airtime.

Intriguing that various old school media is being bought by tech billionaires.

I'm still waiting for the Citizen Kane of our age.

That's not Rupert Murdoch?

I thought that was the Social Network

That’d be Jeff Bezos.

Already is Zuckerberg.

That's it? Time has been so influential; it's so hard to fathom that it could go for $190M.

It's hard to imagine that it went for that much.

Print magazines are dying. Given possibly debt, pension obligations etc. - it wouldn't be surprising if they were really worth a negative value, i.e. they get bought for cheap just for the tax write offs.

Many newspapers facing bankruptcy would love to have a $200M valuation.

Washington Post ===>Jeff Bezos of Amazon Time Magazine ===>Marc Bienoff of Salesforce Which one is next New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newyorker?

The Silicon Valley super rich are on media outlets buying spree. It seems being online news' aggregators (Facebook, Google & co.)and opinion influencers/manipulators is not enough for them. They have to take hold of the content production too either printed, on TV or Radio... Welcome to SV version of Big Brother!

NYT was bailed out a while ago by investment from Carlos Slim (of the Mexican state-granted telecom monopoly). It looks like he currently holds a little under 15%.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/carlos-slim-sells-40-millio...

Not to be snarky, but you listed two. Add in the Facebook guy that bought New Republic years ago and that's three in the last 6 years. That's a spree?

Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic.

Looks like this is the quickest way for west coast tech new money to instantly purchase prestige with the east coast class.

Someone should have bought the Village Voice.

Agreed

Carlos Slim has a good 17% stake of The New York Times so...

Any bets on how much NYT will go for?

Time's chief art critic describes what it was like when magazine expense accounts were deep.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/culture/20...

I think this makes sense. He will most certainly be running for office soon. I think that’s why he entered into the whole “co-ceo” thing recently. He can focus outwardly but make sure the ship stays right.

Americans have a deep fawning respect for 'wealth creators' beyond the normal so any of these guys can easily win, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Benioff, Musk unless they are comprised by some sexual or corruption scandal or the business tanks. Bezos and Zuckerberg especially will likely win.

This is not a cynical dismissal of their achievements, anyone on this forum knows its not easy to do what they have done, and most of us I suspect even harsh critics for being sellouts do admire their achievements because it is not easy and requires intense work.

And also luck as many have worked as hard without results, but building a fair and prosperous society takes more than creating a business but many of us do not see the difference and have become slavish devotees of wealth. So none of the folks from the open source movement stand a chance even though they have shown vision and created more real and social wealth than the above put together. Our loss.

Could be. Bezos also bought WashingtonPost but he did not run for office.

Interestingly there was talk of Zuckerberg running. He did his media campaign of traveling the country talking to the "common" people.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-run...

But Bezos would be more successful I'd think if he wanted to run. Guessing, in general, people have a more agreeable attitude towards Amazon and by extension, Bezos than Facebook and Zuckerberg.

The likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos have far more power, influence and money than they could ever get by being president. What would be their motivation?

I'd argue "prestige" but given some previous (and current) holders of the position I don't think that's the case either.

> The likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos have far more power, influence and money than they could ever get by being president

No way. Being President gives you the supreme power. He can launch new policies; which can have a huge impact on your business. His one tweet can send your stock up or down by a good amount

> But Bezos would be more successful I'd think if he wanted to run.

The left hates him because of the way he runs Amazon, the right hates him because he owns a media outlet that isn't Fox News style right-wing propaganda.

And the center effectively doesn't exist; political opinion is distributed closer to bimodally than unimodally.

So, I don't think Bezos would do nearly as well running for office as influencing behind the scenes. Zuck was probably better off, in terms of electoral politics, before Cambridge Analytica, now he's in a pretty similar place.

I understand where you're coming from but writing off Bezos or Zuck when you literally elected Trump last time round is a little presumptuous for me.

The Zuckerberg for president talk was before the Cambridge Analytica thing blew up. HN has been critical of FB for a very long time, but it was only then that Zuckerberg's public image really took a beating.

Bezos has a much lower public profile. Apparently he's a libertarian. It's easy to portray him as everything that is wrong with American economic life — he's an ultra-rich man running an extremely successful company, while paying countless workers barely enough to live — so it's hard to see him as a viable candidate.

> Bezos has a much lower public profile.

I think that's what I was going for. A lower public profile is better than a public profile with lots of mixed things (say good stuff like charities and bad ones like the CA scandal). And maybe people are also more practical, they are ordering tons of stuff from Amazon, it gets delivered to their door, the see the log on the boxes as they are opening them etc. So it is associated with success, something tangible, something that "works well" more or less.

> he's an ultra-rich man running an extremely

Was just thinking between the ultrarich (assuming billionaires running the country is now the new norm), which ones would have a better chance if they tried.

> But Bezos would be more successful

Maybe due to his age? as he has seen more shades of life than Zuck

He just needed to influence the public opinion over the tax situation.

.. yet.

Are newspapers the new billionaire toys? Serious question!

Hardly new, as many commenters point out. But with print media in straits, now is a perfect time to buy some press.

I don't know much about Time magazine as I feel like I'm too young to have really ever read it. I'm 34, but I recall when I was much younger seeing them at doctor's offices and the like, they seemed too serious or grown up for me to really care about, but they seemed like they were the real deal respectable magazine. I think I once read an article about Putin in one at my dentist in high school which seemed semi interesting but perhaps slightly above my level of care or knowledge of the world at the time.

The other thing people know Time for is that everyone wants to have their face on the cover, that's when you know you made it or you are famous. It was even in like every tv show, movie or whatever, a photoshopped version of Time with someone's face on it. I feel like, what is the equivalent of that today? Sure there are millions of outlets, but not too many seem to have that kind of authority, notoriety or brand around them. Even if Time's decisions were total BS and their quality declined because of the industry, that "meme" is still in people's head and it still probably holds value if someone can appear on the cover or said they did. Now Benioff can do this at will if he wants and can even live that dream himself (if he never was on the cover, I don't know)! That alone seems like its worth it considering the fortune someone like Benioff has. Any of his friends who need a boost of influence can walk over to him and ask for a favour, and boom, now they are on the cover of what to the uncaring eye seems like a still prestigious and noteworthy magazine or more likely are endorsed by a brand which may have become a shell of what it once was, but most people haven't really ever put the thought in to realize that because they never read it in the first place.

I've seen Forbes filling that role in a few movies and TV shows. Tau had a scene with a wall full of magazines with the billionaire guy.

Incorrect. TIME sold for $2.4 billion.

One step closer to Marc's political ambitions

To read Time Magazine you'll now need to make a Salesforce account, the physical copy will be sunsetted and replaced with a Salesforce Cloud version, and it'll be made entirely in Quip.

I think it will be quit the opposite. It will be run like the Washington Post and it will free them up to actually focus on making great content vs. making spammy content to drive clicks and sell magazines.

The Washington Post created a tool called Bandito so they could AB test headlines. Sounds like the opposite of what you described.

> The Washington Post created a tool called Bandito so they could AB test headlines. Sounds like the opposite of what you described.

So that's what happened! I was wondering why the Post's headlines were so clickbait-y.

AB testing is not an evil act by itself. It's an effective technique to understand the user needs. But what you do with the gathered data could make you evil.

No business will want to be out of sync with its users. And no business will want to be in charity mode any more than it should. But doing this without hampering the credibility is the key.

It would be great if they would AB test articles. AB testing headlines is basically looking for ways to draw people into articles. So while it’s responsible and even good to test your product, the headline is not the product.

For a large part of the traffic being driven to wapo, the headline, and possibly picture, is the only thing that drives people to the site. When someone shares an article to social media, you don't get much more. Look right here at HN; how many times has a thread languished in obscurity just for a slightly differently worded headline to drive it to the front page? Headline quality is incredibly vital in this age.

Agreed, for all we know they might already be doing that as well.

The news should be whatever need to know, not what we wanna hear.

Something ridiculous about the media environment today. If time magazine can't survive, why not just put it out of business. The same thing with washingtonpost or theatlantic.

Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies? Just to push their political agenda? To support their political ambitions? To run for office? They obvious aren't doing it to make money.

I don't see how our society benefits when tech billionaires buy up media like this. If oil titans were buying up failing media just to serve as their personal mouthpiece, we'd be a lot more upset.

Also, it's terrible for the media space because it props up failing companies. If failing news companies were allowed to fail, it would open up space for newer companies with better business models or better ideas.

The Washington Post has been profitable for the last two years. Bezos isn’t propping it up, he just helped them transition to a new business model.

Citation: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/washington-post-profitable-gro...

Everything that's old is new again. Citizen Kane is a movie about just this sort of thing, and it wasn't fanciful (it was in fact suppressed for being too close to Hearst's real life).

Agreed. Influential people buying influential media outlets can be a concern if used in a biased way. But unfortunately it's not illegal. If one were to go ahead and make it illegal how exactly would one frame the law? There's no easy answer.

> Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies? Just to push their political agenda? To support their political ambitions? To run for office? They obvious aren't doing it to make money.

I always assumed prestige had a lot to do with it, too.

> Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies?

Because, as core actors of the tech wave, they'd feel responsible for killing them if they didn't.

>> If time magazine can't survive, why not just put it out of business

So if you own a magazine that is failing but you can sell it to a rich person for $150 million but there are no other takers above $100 million, are you suggesting this should be illegal to make $50 million?

Who will compensate you for the lost value? The government? Who decides who is a "rich person?"

You completely misread my comment. Of course it's smart for time magazine to sell a worthless business to a billionaire. My point is why are tech billionaires buying money losing businesses? It certainly isn't for profit or because it is a good financial decision. So what are they getting out of it? Certainly people like bezos and benioff don't like losing money. So what is the purpose?

My issue isn't why did time magazine sell itself. That is obvious and understandable. My issue is why did a tech billionaire buy it. That isn't as obvious and understandable.

Is it possible, in a small part, that the news business is booming in the wild post-2016 political era? I imagine that major publications like NYT/WaPo/etc would have seen a climb in traffic/subscriptions in the last 1-2 years?

Control/agenda is the obvious answer. Rupert Murdoch is immensely powerful in Australia and the US, I guess.

be careful what you wish for -- this society could be in for a startling set of transitions if the Internet as we know it was cut for some reason(s), or better yet that surveillance on consumption becomes unacceptable. "Failing companies" somehow does not seem to me to describe the situation here..

> Why are tech billionaires buying up these companies? Just to push their political agenda? To support their political ambitions? To run for office? They obvious aren't doing it to make money.

So that Trump supporters can speculate on social networks that they're doing it for some nefarious reason and so that Trump-opponents can speculate that they're doing it for the sake of their egos? Maybe they're doing it to troll the ultra-rightwing Breitbart crowd into having a deep-state conspiracy-theory induced stroke?

Clearly it could not be that they understand business and money more than your average commenter on Reddit or Hacker News and see either an intrinsic value in the traditional free press, or have a vision for the long-term financial viability of the business itself? Nah. It must be a conspiracy.

the Time brand name alone is worth more than $200M. Dude scooped a bargain

Only if they can restore the brand to its former household name glory. Time has been peddling awful, low-quality 'viral' content for years now. Their whole website, editorial voice and content quality need to be revamped. Hopefully it can be done. Journalism costs money to do well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com