About
All items are copyright and belong to their original creators. I'm just sharing them here because I find them interesting.
If you want to get all of this automatically, add the feed to your favorite aggregator.
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
May 19 2008
It's true: Condé Nast buys Ars Technica [ars technica]
Shared by Josh Bancroft
Clint's got a great roundup of the Ars/Conde Nast deal from around the webospheres.
There’s really not much to say at this point, but you should probably read Ken Fisher’s complete post about the acquisition on the front page of Ars:
Ars Technica is now focused on increasing its coverage by bringing more experts onboard to full out our technical mojo. We’re going to get broader, but also more in-depth, in areas of IT and science. We are going to be opening offices in San Francisco and Chicago in a matter of weeks, and we are rearranging our editorial team slightly, with Jon Stokes now running Reviews and Features as Deputy Editor, while Eric Bangeman will continue running News and Journals as our Managing Editor.
Critical acclaim
I thought I’d also collect the best of the coverage the deal got on Friday when the news leaked to TechCrunch:
Ken Fisher, one of the co-founders of Ars Technica, may be just a pen-protector expression of the Condé Nast way. After we discussed our common interest in fourth-century Coptic texts — O.K., he talked, I listened — he said that he had been approached by a number of parties interested in buying the site. After talking to people at Wired.com and Reddit, he and his partners decided that the Condé Nast way left them the best chance of developing what had been a hobby on steroids into a business… “We didn’t have to take them on faith,” he said. “They have a track record of understanding what they acquire, which was alarmingly not the case with the other parties we talked to.”
Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica (ranked #5 all time on the BloggerBoard), we’ve confirmed. The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb). Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006). The acquisition price will not be disclosed, but our sources say it is in the $25 million range, which is what Condé Nast paid for Wired.com in 2006.
Details are not officially announced, but Condé Nast, which also owns Wired.com, has acquired Ars Technica. I love Wired.com and I love Ars Technica, so congrats to them both.
Ars’ 8-person news operation will be folded into Wired Digital, which is run by CondeNet. It’s the second recent content acquisition for CondeNet… Steve Newhouse, who oversees Conde Nast’s digital operations, has tasked CondeNet to expand this year through small digital acquisitions… CondeNet is expected to retain the Ars Technica brand, which has a more tech-focused readership than Wired.com.
PaidContent (resyndicated on CBS News/Yahoo)
This deal is among the first done by the new media bank Mesa Global (which represented ArsTechnica), and from the CondeNast side, continues the ascent of Kourosh Karimkhany, who is officially the GM of Wired Digital, but has become the lead corp dev person on the digital side of Conde Nast…Kara recently did a video with ArsTechnica founder Ken Fisher on the philosophy and business of the site…his company was already in the process of being sold when Kara did this video, so you might be able to read in between the lines:
Ars Technica, a decade-old independent tech news and analysis site, is becoming a part of Conde Nast’s Wired Digital group… The acquisition will be announced Monday, sources familiar with the acquisition said, confirming a report Friday in TechCrunch. The price tag was near $25 million, TechCrunch said.
Although Conde Nast is mostly known for print magazines, it has been making inroads into digital publishing, including the purchase of Wired (for about $25-million) last year, as well as the acquisition of Digg competitor Reddit. Conde also owns Epicurious.com and the recently-launched online magazine Portfolio, and has other online assets including Style.com and Brides.com. Conde Nast is a unit of Advance Publications, a private company controlled by the Newhouse family that also owns a number of local business journals and U.S. newspapers.
We’ve confirmed the rumors. The word from Evan Hansen, Wired.com’s editor in chief, is that Condé Nast acquired Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum. The official announcement comes Monday morning… For Condé Nast, which acquired Wired.com for about $25 million in 2006, the deal expands its technology footprint. The editorial staffs, however, will not be integrated.
Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn’t be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.
The Malden-based company that produces the Ars Technica blog has been acquired by Condé Nast Inc. for a reported $25 million, according to an online report… Ars Technica, which is a blog for personal computer enthusiasts, was co-founded in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher, who is now a doctoral candidate in religion at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, according to his online biography.
Tiny Screenfuls (Josh Bancroft)
Wow. I’ve been a huge fan of Ars for several years, and a PAYING subscriber (for access to certain parts of the forum community, but mostly to show them my support with my wallet) since 2001… The “news” part of the site, the front page, has always been OK, and lately has bloomed into one of the best tech news sources out there (and I’m not just saying that because I’m friends with several of the writers and editors).
Ars Technica is officially a technology blog but in reality a bit more. I would put it more into the tech blog/community world as it does contain quite a bit more than the usual tech blog. However, couple of points: 1) there is no corresponding print product, 2) there is no anccllary ecommerce play (e.g. cnet) and 3) there is no corresponding broadcast product. Ars Technica is just that - a destination technology site on the internet.
Then yesterday, Conde Nast announces its intention to purchase Ars Technica, a technology blog, for a rumoured valuation of $25million–a fact confirmed by the Wired blog yesterday (the purchase, not the price). I’m not sure how Ars Technica would fit into the Conde Nast family just yet, with its editorial staff not being integrated into Wired, as posited by TechCrunch. But Cripes, you think: $25 million for a blog isn’t too shabby is it? I liked one comment on TechCrunch that said: “I still can’t quite wrap my head around the valuations of blogs.”
Conde Nast, the mother-company of Wired, has acquired technology blog Ars Technica (Latin for the art of technology) reportedly for $25 million, according to Mike Arrington of Techcrunch… The report added that founders Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes will remain with the company as they get integrated with Wired Digital… Formal announcement is expected next week.
I know the guys who run ars (Caesar et al.) have worked very hard for years with little reward so I am happy for them, but I can’t help being concerned about what this will mean for ars’ famous independence. I have been a paid subscriber for more than 4 years because I supported what they were doing- the access to extra parts of the site was secondary.
I’m so happy for Ken and Jon and everyone else. This is certain to mean huge things in the coming months, keep your ears and eyes peeled!
