Ziff Davis is buying CNET for just $100M | Hacker News Reader

Ziff Davis is buying CNET for just $100M

theverge.com

14 pointsc5karl14 comments

Can anyone more business savvy explain deals like this? $100M isn’t chump change and CNET is actual garbage. What’s the strategy here?

Inertia from people who don't know any better if I had to guess. There have been several sites that I used to frequent over the years that got acquired yet still had my attention for long after they should have because they were able to "boil the frog", which is to say insidiously reduce investment in content and degrade quality in an envelope such that I didn't notice how garbage it actually was until much later.

"The Hill" is perhaps the most recent example I can think of - they went from being a legitimate media outlet to a fire hose of hilariously-slanted editorials and pop sidebar schlock in just a few short years.

I just don’t believe that to be honest. I feel like someone with $100M to spare is doing some pretty decent research before doing this acquisition, but maybe I’m thinking too highly of the white man in the suit. Reminds me of the MySpace acquisition which was in the tens of millions clearly after it had already been wiped off the earth.

Exactly, it's been going on for years. Buy a media outlet, optimize for cost (fire half your writers), content degradation, fire more writers and replace them with AI, watch readers depart. Only the AI bit is new. I've seen it repeat over and over.

Maybe this guy is thinking AI generated CNET articles will save them, heh.

Same question here.

Is it worth it for the SEO value?

Are they planning to make AI training deals for the corpus of older content?

Does the company own real estate, and/or is there an applicable debt-loading maneuver?

From the article

> According to the Times, Shah wants CNET because it’s a “well-known industry brand” and still has an audience that’s large enough to be attractive to tech advertisers.

Eight-year-old me used to trawl the CNet Downloads section for hours looking for video games to play (which were more often than not bizarre half-baked DOS RPGs and adventure games). Later on I religiously checked their MP3 player reviews to see whether I should sink my hard-saved cash into a Rio Carbon or the Creative Zen Micro that I eventually bought. It's unfortunate but not unexpected to see them relegated to the second tier of internet publishing decades later.

Trading zombie websites for nickles.

It's funny how badly pretty much every corporate acquisition of web publishing site has gone.

I'm not sure $100 million is nickels, but yeah. CNET used to be ok, if not good, now they're an SEO/AI trash company.

Well, when it was valued at $1.8 Billion in 2008... it's nickels in comparison. It is selling off the mummified corpse of something that used to have value.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/business/media/cnet-ziff-...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41170032)

Doesn’t cnet run AI articles? I didn’t think they’re relevant anymore

Mentioned in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com