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CBS Acquires CNET Networks for $1.8 Billion
An anonymous reader writes "According to an announcement made today by Neil Ashe, CEO of CNET Networks, CBS has acquired CNET Networks. "Today, CNET Networks announced that it has been acquired by US media company CBS, in a deal valued at $1.8bn. The agreement represents an important strategic step for both companies and should be completed by the third quarter of 2008." So guess we'll be seeing The Late Show with Dan Ackerman, Molly Wood in Hollywood and CSISpot." If you'd like to read about it someplace other than CNet, Ian Lamont contributes a link to coverage at The Standard. It seems reasonable to ask how much longer they'll let news.com remain an IT-centric site.
Seriously, I remember playing Shadowrun and Cyberpunk as a kid (ok, not a kid, but a long time ago...) and thinking the idea of megacorps running the world was nice for a fictional view of the future.
Apparently it wasn't so fictional with all these multi-billion dollar mergers of mega-media corporations, manipulation of political agendas by corporate interests, and whatnot.
Where do I sign up for my cybernetic implants because I know how this story goes and I want to have a fighting edge when things go bleak...
The other title for this article could have been "CBS buys domain name 'news.com' for $1.8 billion, also gets some website thrown in for good measure".
The next time they create "fake but accurate" documents, they will be far more plausible!
Brett
Haha... *tear*. Am I the only one who is actually sad about this? I lose faith in new media outlets when they partner with old media. I know Cnet is big and corporate anyway, but it's like your favorite local supermarket chain being bought out by the big, national one; you know worse service and product quality is on the way, all in the name of (supposedly) lower prices.
For me, Cnet was the Amazon of review websites. Sure it was big, it was corporate, but it provided solid baseline advice on pricing and advice, along with user reviews and links to other websites or places to buy the product. Compare that baseline with a little in depth search on fan sites and blogs, and you were sure to find the easily accessible deal on the net. Cnet could be trusted, in the same way Amazon could/can be trusted.
This is another MSNBC monstrosity. No one trusted them from the first, but Cnet is losing respect in my eyes and my chances of going there will dimish as the months of incorperation with CBS increase. This rings like I imagine a major network partnering with Amazon would. I would lose respect for the beauty of a purely "new world" portal of information and services, feeling like it was sold out to old world profit motives and corporate greed.
Old networks are trying to "stay relevent" but they are only dead anchors on sailing ships of new technology. When has this kind of partnership helped? An example of a good acqusition was Google/YouTube, being that they were both new world technologies with distinct advantages for each other. Old media is just trying to keep their hands in the money pot, and as they become more irrelevent, they start to make grand, flailing gestures like this, much like the record companies and RIAA.
This smacks of the same way Microsoft "innovates": buying companies which have technologies they can quickly repackage and sell off as their own. CBS brings nothing to this merger. They are acquiring a relevent, new world technology and are going to suck it dry, purely in their best interest. Unless they stay fairly hand-off and simply siphon ad revenue, Cnet will go down the drain and become another "made over" new world technology no one (informed) cares about.
Anyone have suggestions for other broad-base review websites I can start visiting?
Technorant, out.
CBS is buying much more than just a few (highly valuable) domains and websites with the acquisition of CNET - they are buying a highly trained technical team that has experience serving huge amounts of data to many users at once across multiple domains targeting many different interests. Which is of course, essentially what CBS wants to do, except they took a long time getting into the internet. To be completely honest they would have been better off making this purchase a few years ago.
This isn't to say that CBS doesn't already have a talented technical team, but I would place my bet on CBS planning to expand further into the internet realm. They probably realize that the future of their medium is tied heavily to the internet, and are making strides to ensure that they will be able to deliver their content over the internet seamlessly in the future. Even accounting for team attrition after acquisition, acquiring an entire company at once is probably much easier than a long term hiring process, especially for a company as large as CBS which has already hesitated too long.
CNET also has a blog that , while not extremely well known, is frequently perused by JavaScript and web developers- Clientside. I haven't visited Download.com in a long time, but I visit Clientside nearly every day for examples , reference, etc. I'm a little worried about its fate(considering that the author could leave always leave CNET after the acquisition), but I hope it survives. It's also a good example of the talent behind CNET- there are some good programmers there, for sure.
Their car reviews are especially bad, not from a biased sense, rather from an it's-obvious-the-nerd-who-wrote-this-review-knows-nothing-about-cars-and-it-is-obvious sense.
Going to a website called "news.com" for your news is like the products in the movie Repo Man that were labeled "Drink", "Beer" and "Food".
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning