On the heels of CBS acquiring CNET for $1.8-billion comes another deal involving “old” media and “new” media: according to TechCrunch, the folks over at Conde Nast — the magazine publishing family that owns Vogue, the New Yorker and Wired — have plunked down about $25-million for Ars Technica, the tech site that recently caused a minor blog storm over an alleged lack of attribution in their blogs posts.

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.

According to FM Publishing’s page on Ars Technica, the site gets about 19 million page views a month (TechCrunch says the site gets 4.5 million uniques a month, according to a source). With a CPM fee of about $36 per ad, that means the site could make as much as $2-million a month in advertising revenue — and it apparently has just eight employees, including co-founders Ken “Caesar” Fisher and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes, who started the site in 1998.

Update:

I remembered that Doug McIntyre from 24/7 Wall Street did a financial analysis of some of the leading blogs and their theoretical value awhile back, so I went and looked at it, and here’s what he said:

“Ars Technica: $15 million. High church high tech blog. Sites ranks 2,500 in Alexa. Compete shows over 800,000 visitors. Audience is growing very rapidly. Quancast has reach at 1.1 million. Ads are all premium clients. Site should be getting $40 per page CPM. Page views are probably six million a month. Revenue of almost $3 million. Site appears to have high end edit staff writing. Margin estimated at 35%. High-end site should be very valuable. Fifteen times operating profit.”

Not bad, Doug. Obviously Conde Nast thought it was worth a little more.

Sarah Perez at Read/Write Web (who also blogs at Sarah in Tampa) has a post up about how Generation Y is going to change the Web, and she makes some excellent points. But I would argue that the generation entering the workforce now isn’t just going to change the Web — it’s changing all kinds of things, including some of the ways companies function (or don’t function). I don’t want to be accused of social-media “triumphalism” or Kool-Aid drinking or whatever, but I think that in many ways we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

A few of the points that Sarah makes — including “They’re Plugged In,” “Socializing Rules” and “Work Tools Need to Mirror Web Tools” — are the same conclusions that a colleague of mine and I came to while putting together a research report for Don Tapscott’s New Paradigm Group (now part of nGenera), which will be published soon. We looked at the ways in which companies can use social-networking tools to help their employees get more engaged and collaborate with each other more easily, and how that can benefit both the company and the employee.

Many of the companies we looked at as part of our research, including large companies such as Johnson & Johnson (which happens to have a thriving internal wiki), said the same kinds of things that Sarah is writing about: that their younger employees don’t just want social-networking style tools such as instant messaging, Facebook, wikis, blogs and so on — they expect them. In some ways, being connected and sharing links and thoughts and feedback is like oxygen. It’s just part of the environment. And a company that doesn’t have or encourage those tools will be like a company that doesn’t have telephones, or bathrooms. How’s that for Kool-Aid?

At the end of Sarah’s piece, I was pleased to see a presentation called The Gen-Y Guide to Web 2.0 Work by Sacha Chua, who now works at IBM, but has been part of the Toronto DemoCamp and TorCamp scene — as well as helping out at past mesh conferences — for some time now, and is irrepressibly optimistic and engaged. I’ve embedded the presentation here as well. Some excellent advice.

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The “whose data is it anyway” wars seem to have flared up again, judging by what’s going on with Google and Facebook over the data-sharing issue: Facebook has blocked Google’s new Google Connect feature from pulling your “social graph” data out of Facebook. But it’s not because Facebook recently launched a competing feature called Friend Connect, of course — why would you think that? No, it’s because Facebook is concerned about protecting your privacy.

As Mike Arrington notes in another post, this is a pretty flimsy argument at best. Facebook says that it’s worried that the information about you and your profile will somehow go astray during its journey through Google’s connect feature to some third-party site, and that you can’t disconnect that third-party site from within Facebook — which is true. But Google notes that it gives Google Connect users complete control over which sites see their info, so that isn’t a problem.

Robert Scoble has a post up that seems to argue that Facebook is right and Mike is wrong — a debate that continues in the comments on Arrington’s post — but to be honest I lost track of what Scoble’s argument actually was somewhere in there. To me it seems obvious that I should have the ability to move data that is attached to my profile (photos, phone numbers, addresses, emails, etc.) to some other site — in a way that didn’t involve screen-scraping.

If those sites were connected somehow so that the data could be updated in both places at once, so much the better. I don’t particularly care whether it’s Google’s OpenSocial or Google’s Connect, or Facebook’s Friend Connect, or whatever the hell MySpace’s thing is called — or whether it’s through some agreed-upon standard that everyone adheres to, like RSS or HTML. It seems obvious that while everyone is saying they want to be open, they still want to control my data. Umair Haque says it’s more proof that Facebook is fundamentally evil.

Whatever it is, I would like some. According to Henry Blodget, the Citigroup analyst seems to think that Amazon will be selling $750-million worth of its Kindle e-book readers within two years. What actual data is this analysis based on, you ask? Absolutely none whatsoever, as Kevin Maney points out at Portfolio, since the company has refused to give any details about Kindle sales. In other words, it’s just a bald-ass guess. And as far as I can tell, it’s a howler.

As Henry himself knows all too well, making outlandish claims about what stocks and/or products will do in the future can get you noticed pretty quickly — so maybe that’s what Mark is after here. Or maybe it’s a kind of thought experiment, in which you run some theoretical numbers in order to get a rough sense of what might happen. In any case, while Henry seems to think Mahaney’s estimates are reasonable and even likely in some cases, the whole thing seems off base to me.

The Citigroup analyst figures that Amazon will see the same kind of sales growth for its e-book readers as Apple saw for its iPods, but will only sell about half as many. That seems hugely inflated. Like Mahaney, I have absolutely no figures to back me up, but I would guess that the market for e-book readers is less than one-tenth the size of the market for portable music players, perhaps even smaller. And the idea that users will buy a book a month just seems insane. And there’s also the Apple factor, as Rex and others have pointed out.

The only aspect that Henry seems to agree is “optimistic” is the idea that Amazon will make the same kind of revenue from e-books as it does from printed books. As Blodget notes, that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon — since publishers will need to be convinced to sell them, and readers will need to be convinced to buy them, and that means they need to be cheap — and may never happen at all. I don’t know what Mark Mahaney was trying to do with his Kindle analysis, but if he was trying to make a credible argument, he failed.

So CBS — an “old” media giant that hasn’t been doing so well lately — plunks down $1.8-billion for CNET, a “new” media giant that hasn’t been doing so well lately. Does this sound like something to get excited about? Not to me. In fact, it sounds a little like desperation on both sides — CNET to get a deal done that would get it out of the clutches of some disgruntled shareholders, and CBS to get some kind of coherent online strategy going in the ninth inning. Some others seem to disagree, however. In fact, it’s interesting to see the polarized opinion on the deal when you look at some of the opinion out there.

Fred Wilson of A VC probably came closest to my thoughts on it when he sent a Twitter message right after the news broke, and said that he didn’t really care about the deal because it was “all about yesterday, not tomorrow.” Mike Arrington, who has been a relentless critic of CNET — and even wrote a post about how some of the top blogs should get together and destroy it — says that:

“CNET failed to disrupt the old guard, and will find itself to be a footnote in Internet history rather than the headline it should have been.”

Others seem to think the deal makes tremendous sense: Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web says that CNET is “as stable an online collection of brands as anyone out there” and that:

“What gets validated here is this: great online ad sales, high production value, serious talent, company maturity and breadth in both content and distribution.”

Paul Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider is another fan, saying that while “there’s almost no synergy, operationally or brand-wise” between the two companies, and CBS doesn’t have much of a digital platform:

“That’s as good an argument for making the deal as any — rather than trying to build your way on to the Web, why not buy it? And if the JANA guys are right, CNET isn’t a dying asset — it’s just one that needs to be revitalized.”

In a comment on Kafka’s post, Henry Blodget says:

“I actually think it’s smart. CBS is a dying business with strong cash flow–it’s about time they used it to make some big bets. More importantly, there ought to be a lot of ways these companies can work together. The size is far more manageable than AOL - Time Warner, the cultures are more compatible, etc. Strikes me as a bold but sound bet.”

So why would I say it feels like desperation? As Megan Barnett at Portfolio mag points out, CNET hardly fits the profile of what CBS said it was after when Les Moonves said that it was looking for “the next YouTube.” CNET isn’t even the last YouTube. It’s a pile of underwhelming assets that mostly make money because they aggregate eyeballs and have some good domain names. To me it feels like CBS just decided to buy something big and to hell with whether it made any sense or not.

I think Doug Macintyre at 24/7 Wall St does a good job of laying out why this is a bad deal, one that he says could be “the worst M&A deal of the year.” He says that “the high price CBS is paying borders on being irresponsible” given the kind of condition CNET is in, and that when it comes to financial performance, CBS “is almost as bad off as CNET, but on a larger scale.” Bingo. Nice job, Quincy.