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.

Comments

New name?

[gEvil (beta)]

And the new company is....CnetBS?

Re:New name?

[abolitiontheory]

And the new company is....CnetBS?

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.

other Second Rate Site Acquired By Big Media

[illectro]

CNet has been struggling recently and that valuation seems too high, but traditional media have a bad habit of paying too much for aqcuisitions of tech companies.... Comcast Acquires Plaxo, even though nobody can figure out how to make money AOL Acquires Bebo (popular, but not enough to justify almost a billion dollars) CBS (again!) Acquires last.fm (popular among bloggers but eclipsed by other sites in the real world) the only big media deal I can think of in recent years that was a good bet was Newscorp's undervalued' acquisition of myspace.

Re:news.com domain valuation ...

[techstar25]

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".