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New York Times Buys About.com for $410 Million
IAmTheDave writes "Reuters has the story that the New York Times Co. is set to purchase About.com for $410M from Primedia, Inc. The high purchase price is due to increased ad revenue, up 30% from last year." From the article: "Phillips pointed out that Internet companies have started trading again at significantly higher multiples, and said The Times Co. would be able to use ad revenue from About.com to make up for the flagging classified ad sales that have plagued the industry." Commentary also available at The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and CNN Money.
*yawn*
No doubt. I tried a link to that site one time doing a little research on something. It was 99% ads, 0.99% whitespace, and 0.01% information--and I use the term information liberally here. Some of the articles themselves are unabashed ads.
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
I know the NYT is into everything, but as a writer, it bothers me that one of the nations premiere papers are moving significantly away from their base operation. Printing news is not simply disseminating facts.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I want to go on record saying this is going to be a horrible move for the Times. Please mod this comment up so that five years from now if anyone sees this comment then I look like a genius for predicting the future.
Did they overpay? Yeah, probably in the short term, but let's look at the situation...
While the deal was certainly rich by price to cashflow and cash to revenue metrics, there are a limited number of these internet spaces for sale. CBSmarketwatch.com just went for over $500 million as a comparison.
The NY Times currently has a market cap of around $5.4 billion. They expect this deal to be accretive to earnings two years out. It doesn't represent an enormous purchase, just a pricey one by many measures.
The ad market for printed newspapers has been flat. Growth is expected to be anemic this year.
Newspaper circulations in general are down.
They picked up approximately 22 million unique eyeballs a month to target ads to via this deal, and a high traffic established internet site. The internet advertising market is growing.
Digitial media / advertising is a growth industry compared to the lackluster printed newspaper market that is unlikely to get better any time soon.
Traditional media outlets like the NYT need to continue to build internet presences to avoid obsolesence.
The deal while a bit expensive makes a whole lot of sense to stay competitive as media evolves and changes.
In other words, it'll get more accurate.
A producer told me, "Donald Trump is news. ..."
I didn't hear anything about Donald Trump aside from a random bankruptcy and his distant plans about building here until The Apprentice came out. But since that program came out, he appears to be everywhere.
The distinction, of course, is whether Dateline is promoting a product (he is in this case a product) or reacting to a product that's already been promoted. But Dateline is a "news magazine show"--determining what exactly this is will be an exercise left to the reader because I sure as hell can't--and I don't think it falls in the same class of journalistic integrity one might expect, from the New York Times, the BBC, or The Economist. But then again, we make excuses for the media a lot--I'm sure your city has that blatant left/right wing daily, the never-awe-inspiring local news program, the weekly independent rag, etc. I'd like to have a source of news I don't have to make excuses for and remove filters to have an idea of what's really happening.
Altho this is digressing rather off topic, there's a reason they call it the boob-tube. The way television broadcasts news is almost like bottle feeding a baby. And if your exposure to a journal article or government report is from it flying on screen with one or two sentences zoomed and highlighted, or your idea of public perception is what the "man on the street" says, or you gauge a corporation's conduct by what their paid spokesdrone says, you're on that bottle. And most people who are don't even realise it. That needs to change more than anything.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
It is impossible to find "the line". To me it looks like a spectrum with Fox at the marketing/political-spruking end and the BBC at the news/information end. Here in Australia (sorry about Rupert Murdoch) we have 3 big free to air commercial stations and two stations in the BBC tradition. I only watch the commercial one's for movies and laughs.
Unfortunately we are like the US, the majority of Australians are not interested in anything beyond the sound-bites and cannot spot an advert unless it comes with bonus steak knives. To them propoganda is something the Nazi's did and does not come out of thier TV set. We get the BBC, FOX, CNN, etc on cable, during the early months of the Iraq war the same sanitised story came from every station except 3, the BBC and the two Australian (BBC type) stations ABC and SBS. When I was watching the 24x7 war news of the time, it was like the BBC was reporting on a different war. A few years have passed now and it turns out that the BBC were doing thier job while most of the others were simply handing out pentagon and whitehouse press releases. The message to Journalist's was clear "Don't question our motives, methods or facts". Michael Moore tried but was ultimately defeated by the "Fat Liberal" sound-bite. ( For the many slashdotters who despise MM, ask yourself, if his facts are inaccurate why is it that he is continually attacked via villification rather than contrary evidence? Note: I said "facts" and "evidence" not conjecture, conclusions, opinion or humour. )
Does BBC/ABC/SBS portray the "unbiased truth"? Maybe not, but they are alot closer to reality than any commercial station I have ever seen. They also seem to remeber what was news last week and have an ability to tie it into current events. Some of the others obviously don't want anyone to remeber what happened last week, thier strategy is to blast away contradictions by shouting louder or changing the subject to JJ's tits. As for what I have seen of the NYT, it is closer to the BBC end of the spectrum but does not understand how to profit from porting news (and it's reputation) to the web.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.