As a (casual) reader of several of the newsletters you maintain: Peter, hang in there, don't sell! :-D

For those who are not familiar (if that's possible), check out https://cooperpress.com/publications/

To your (& Balaji's) point - one of tried and true methods of customer acquisition for SaaS is content marketing, but it's a very long game and you need to have quality content. Acquiring a blog or a media company that already has that has clear ROI.

DO already has a solid knowledge base of articles ("How to ... on Ubuntu Server" almost always leads to DO) but mostly for the back-end part of the stack. From that perspective, buying CSS-Tricks is not too surprising.