CNN to buy Mashable for $200 million + | Hacker News Reader

CNN to buy Mashable for $200 million +

thenextweb.com

110 pointskunle52 comments

I really love things like this. Its old media trying to get in the game on "new" media. It only benefits their eventual demise. There's several things happening here:

1) The founders of Mashable, and their stockholders, are earning out on what they've built. That's a good thing, and well deserved.

2) Its really Turner Broadcasting that's doing the buying here. Its an old media company again demonstrating that they are unable, or unwilling, to modernize. They are throwing money at a problem rather than innovating.

3) Such a large amount of money flowing from old media into the technology sector works to hasten the demise of companies like CNN/Turner Broadcasting. It drains their coffers a bit more, while providing new cash flow to the founders and employees in Mashable and frees them up to pursue new innovative ventures over the next few years.

pg really saw something important when he added RFS 9 - Kill Hollywood to the Request for Startups at Ycombinator. While CNN is a "news" company and not directly part of Hollywood, they are most certainly tied at the hip to the same people that run Hollywood. So in that aspect, this is a very good thing.

What if they bought HN? Then throwing money at the problem would probably be a good thing for them.

How do you "buy" HN? HN is a community-driven site and long-running experiment. I suppose YC could sell the domain name, but the community would just evaporate and move elsewhere over night.

Like Conde Nast bought reddit?

And saw no return, put next to no effort into improvements, and later spun them back into the wild.

And in the meantime, reddit's community was completely unaffected by the changing of hands.

Reddit could make a fortune - they just don't try very hard. We'll see what the next CEO does. But if profit was a concern for Conde Nast it wouldn't be hard to deliver it.

Reddit is now worth at least ten times as much as when it was acquired.

True, but this wasn't the doing of Conde Nast, nor did Conde Nast see this 10x increase when they pushed reddit out on its own. Reddit's growth was organic.

Last I heard, CN still owns reddit even though the site now operates independently, so CN still has the chance to recoup their investment, but this will take a more profitable business model without sacrificing user trust. Valuations on sheer page hits or user counts are faulty with a capital F U if you can't figure out how to make money from them.

It doesn't matter if it was Conde Nast's doing. They made an investment in a new media property, and it has seemingly gone splendidly with little to no 'fallout' from having a corporate overlord owning a community site.

It's ludicrous, but technically possible, and amusing to think about. Thank you for suggesting that.

Forgive me if I sound ignorant, but... How in the name of everlasting gods can Mashable of all things be worth $200,000,000?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

I don't know about the stats of Mashable, but I'm pretty sure it's driving a lot of pageviews during the past months. CNN is probably taking that into account, not the quality of their articles.

That's about $10 per unique visitor if they're paying for traffic... if CNN are buying it for page views they're... stupid.

I think it shows how much cash traditional media is capable of generating compared to Internet based media. I think this should mean more and more ads should move from the more expensive media to the cheaper alternative, in theory.

It's a such a crazy price, but we have seen similar purchases of blogs like TC recently.

Normally, websites are sold on the basis of a year or two worth of revenue - I am talking content websites, rather than services. There's no way that Mashable is making anything near $100 mill per year.

Old media generally has more money than brains. They are used to command-and-control and think if they just buy new media hotness they'll then be able to grab the steering wheel and drive into the future. The reality is their impulse to control usually makes failure inevitable.

I agree with others that Mashable is deteriorating in quality. However the bulk of their visitors, I bet don't come from "devoted" followers, but rather from search engines, I would venture around 75-80%. They're like a content farm disguised as a quality blog network. They put out 10-20 pages a day, for 4-5 years, and each page gets like what? 20 links, 20 likes, 20 +1's? That all adds up to high search engine rankings. At this point it doesn't matter if Mashable jumps the shark - they can just keep on putting on mediocre content, and it'll still rank based on their brand and authority.

I don't know if CNN knows that's what they're buying - they probably think Mashable has lots of "fans". They do, but it's not that valuable.. definitely not 200 million valuable. If Google gave them a site-wide penalty, their traffic would plummet overnight.

So far the comments seem to be negative. Just want to say congrats to Pete Cashmore. I don't know him and don't really read Mashable. But, I'm sure him and his team have put years of their lives into making Mashable a success. When he first started, I bet he never imagined a day like this would come. He made it happen. Good for him.

I remember when Mashable was on a blogger account and Pete was running it out of his parents basement. Well done, Pete and team.

I'm sad to see a site like Mashable get rewarded for their crap, but if this contributes to their eventual demise, I guess I don't mind that much.

I +1 you. This is sad indeed. Imagine all those wannabees setting up websites with minimum content, couple bloggers, plastered all around with ads.

on the other hand - does anyone know Mashable's profits?

Having read a few comments regarding the valuation of Mashable at the $200MM range, I've decided to post my 2 cents here.

Personally, I think the valuation for Mashable is achievable when we consider Mashable as similar to HuffingtonPost rather than TechCrunch - Mashable is no longer a tech/startup blog.

HuffingtonPost which was acquired for $315MM which was 10x its 2010 revenue and it is this exit, which I believe turned Pete's head and meant he's seeking an exit. Whilst, I don't know Pete personally to confirm if this is true but from what I am hearing this seems to be the case.

I may be completely wrong but, I doubt it as Mashable has been expanding its verticals & focusing on them more since, the HuffingtonPost acquisition to become more like them rather than TechCrunch etc.

Bringing TechCrunch back into the mix and you consider they are on course to do $10-15MM this year & you consider the fact that Mashable hosts similar events AND has more pageviews/visitors than TechCrunch then $20MM seems plausible.

Remember, Mashable virtually doubled its revenue in 2010 or 2011 just by focusing on selling its advertisements itself rather than through ad networks.

Additionally, Mashable also offered some of their top writers retainer bonuses in order to stay and prevent the turnover they were experiencing and to stop it putting off potential buyers - some writers/editors were offered up to $200-300k to remain at Mashable from what I have heard as a cash bonus on top of their normal salary

As I highlighted earlier with regards to the expansion of Mashable, Ulanoff was brought to expand Mashable into general news which again proves my theory as highlighted by the launch of World and Entertainment News.

Likewise, I have been told that pageviews have also become the main metric for success at Mashable. This is over unique visitors and their writers have been told to insert a gallery where possible to increase and generate additional pageviews (For instance, if you go on Mashable yourself you can see that they have more of the BusinessInsider feel with Slideshows).

With all these things considered, I think that Mashable can easily be worth around the $150-200 Million mark especially when you consider the HuffingtonPost acquisition price.

Makes the $25,000,000 AOL spent on TechCrunch seem so paltry.

I'm shocked that Mashable is perceived to be 8x the value TechCrunch was, when it was acquired by AOL. Either TechCrunch was low-balled, or Mashable's value is over-inflated. I suspect the latter...

Mashable has a wider audience, less niche (startups are not mainstream yet). Mashable also has a higher traffic rate. Pete Cashmore knows what he's doing.

'Cashmore' -I honestly for a second thought it was a pun on the founder's name,till I googled him. Extremely impressive exit for a 26 year old guy!

I suspect both.

Article was updated: "...the NYT has three sources telling them that there are indeed ‘advanced talks’ being held about a potential acquisition of Mashable by CNN, but that a deal could still fall through..."

The main takeaway here(if true) is about branding.

There is hardly any proprietary software any more these days, it's been largely commoditised.

In this situation, the wise words of Warren Buffet ring true. He said that the best investment is one where you take a commodity, brand it, then sell it. So make great software, brand it and sell it.

I'd like you to extrapolate on the software commodity quote.

Has anyone felt Mashable sort of deteriorated the past few months?

I was never very impressed by Mashable. Far too much linkbait.

Far too many "100 ways to" or "Be sure not to miss" and then their "tips" being rehashing of other people's work or thigns I could've thought of myself too, especially with a little Google work.

Seems to work to sell for $200M :-)

No. Rather seems to be a _part_ of work that got them to sell for $200MM. Mashable has executives with very deep connections. I say this was more important.

Mashable is essentially a low-quality content farm. Certainly no place for a self-respecting geek to get tech news.

Mashable represents what media has become; popularist, global and free. This is largely driven by us believe it or not, with help from the Internet off course.

Without the "sort of". Mashable has deteriorated noticeably the past few months. It was a pretty interesting blog about social networks. Now it's a pageview machine. The best example of this happened when Bin Laden was killed [1].

I deleted it from my Google Reader months ago, there were a lot of articles daily and few of them were somewhat interesting.

I pretty much stopped reading Mashable when I discovered HN. I probably haven't been on Mashable at all in the last 6 months, as the last I did there was absolutely nothing of value that I hadn't already seen elsewhere.

I've moved away from sourcing news through multiple news apps like mashable to consuming all my tech news via a news aggregation app called pulse.

I feel like Business Insider is doing the same crap. Top 10 XYZ regurgitated 10 ways and split testing headlines to get more pageviews. No quality whatsoever.

If true, that value is off the chart crazy but makes this also amazing. Pete Cashmore has definitely put the time in.... but as many of us know has been crazy with the linkbait drivel for like the past year or more. He must be in a surreal state of bliss about all this.

Well i have to say this was totally out of the blues for me and 200m is still an over valuation IMO. esp considering that is the value of page views. but congrats to Pete and team!

first congrats to Pete Cashmore and his team... now let's be honest here CNN is buying the traffic ...hate it or love it Mashable is driving a lot of traffic with their "spammy tactics"..CNN don't really care about the quality because they can add their own staff later...However $200M is a huge price tag ...is it as valuable as the huffington post? what's going on here...is it a race for page views with cheap content...news media is dying....

They're about 20 days early with this announcement.

This is like seeing a re-run of the broadcast.com sale.

$200 million?

ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

Finally, both TechCrunch and Mashable are dead!

Sure, they're dead. In the same way that NeXT is dead.

"surely, you must be kidding?"

must be a typo. 20 million, right.

How clueless can CNN be?

The word is: boondoggle

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