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 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.

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.