HowStuffWorks Acquired by Discovery for $250M | Hacker News Reader

HowStuffWorks Acquired by Discovery for $250M

mashable.com

22 pointsterpua9 comments

HowStuffWorks was probably the site I visited most through middle school and a good bit of high school. Wikipedia has largely replaced it, at least in my experience.

Considering they raised $120 million in VC, is a $250 million acquistion a major success? The founders are probably rich now, but for the investors, it doesn't seem much better than breaking even (especially since the site is ten years old). What did they need $120 million for, anyway?

ah, I had no idea they raised $120 million. That's a lot of cash for a site like this.

the founders actually might not be rich -- VCs tend to structure deals that only make founders rich on a big (probably more than the 2x here) exit.

(for example, liquidation preferences and other terms can make the returns much uglier for founders/employees/other common stockholders - http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/01/term_sheet_liqu.ht... )

That is astonishing. It's basically a large book.

There are a good number of videos and what seems like a fairly active community.

[edit: but that number is high]

It's one of my favorite sites by far. A bit of an aged brand but definitely a nice site.

how much would wikipedia be worth then?

Wikipedia is on google's front page for almost every noun in the English language, and #1 for many.

Examples:

"top": 3 and 4

"ten": 11

"noun": 2

"English": 1 and 2

"Language": 1

"number": 1 and 2

"one": 3 and 4

"many": 3

What's it worth? Billions and billions and billions.

The problem is that if it is ever sold the community will likely migrate away (unless the company buying manages to keep the same open and democratic feeling to it). I'm also curious what the potential for advertising on Wikipedia is. I think throwing up adds on Wikipedia would reduce it's encyclopedic nature to people. Not to mention that Wikipedia has received ridiculously large donations from large companies and that would no longer be true if it got bought out, so the actual costs of running it would probably be really high.

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