CNET Merges with CBS
Saturday, May 17th, 2008CBS has announced that it will be buying CNET for $1.8 billion. This is even more than Google paid for YouTube. If you have never heard of CNET, they are an on-line publisher with a set of popular web site, especially web sites that focus on tech issues.
$1.8 billion seems pretty pricey. But CNET is actually a publicly traded company that has actual revenues and, occasionally, profits, making it quite the rarity among popular web sites including YouTube. It creates content that draws about 35 million unique viewers per month, which is really what interests CBS.
I am sure that we are going to see more big deals this summer. Tech has been beaten down on the stock market, but there are many large tech companies sitting on huge piles of cash. The Microsoft-Yahoo deal has reached a hiccup, but the rest of the industry is still on fast forward.
