{"id":1765,"date":"2007-10-03T08:44:47","date_gmt":"2007-10-03T12:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/10\/03\/cnet-to-buy-techcrunch-why-not\/"},"modified":"2007-10-03T08:44:47","modified_gmt":"2007-10-03T12:44:47","slug":"cnet-to-buy-techcrunch-why-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/10\/03\/cnet-to-buy-techcrunch-why-not\/","title":{"rendered":"CNET to buy TechCrunch — why not?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boy, Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget is sure on a roll — or make that a troll. Today he’s got a post<\/a> about how TechCrunch could be bought by CNET for $100-million or so. His post is actually a response to one by Doug McIntyre at 24\/7 Wall Street, in which Doug hypothesizes about blog networks such as TechCrunch and Huffington Post and GigaOm and how much they might be worth<\/a> to existing media entities.<\/p>\n

Mike has a sarcastic response to Henry’s post here<\/a>. And there’s no question that $100-million seems like a fairy tale price — a lot like Henry’s $2,000 Google post from yesterday<\/a>. Still, the idea itself makes sense. TechCrunch or GigaOm would fit as a part of CNET or several other media entities. The ironic thing is that selling would probably be a mistake, because at the moment they are doing far better than most of the companies that would be thinking about buying them.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

Is $100-million nonsensical or not? Let’s look at the numbers: TechCrunch says it has<\/a> 1.5 million unique visitors a month — although a commenter below says those numbers may be high — and CNET Networks has about 10 million a month, according to comScore<\/a> (Compete says about 6 million<\/a> a month). But as we all know, it’s about more than just uniques, right? It’s about monetization. <\/p>\n

CNET had revenue last year of almost $400-million, although it only made a profit<\/a> of $7-million, which is pretty pathetic. No one except Mike knows what TechCrunch made last year (check below for some Valleywag scuttlebutt — I have no idea whether it is even close). <\/p>\n

Still, CNET’s market cap is $1.2-billion. If you assume that someone could monetize Mike’s 1.5 million unique visitors better than CNET can monetize its uniques (which wouldn’t be a stretch) then you could easily come to the conclusion that TechCrunch is worth about 20 per cent of what CNET is worth — or about $250-million. <\/p>\n

I’m not saying it is, I’m just saying $100-million doesn’t look all that crazy. Oh, and Mike? If you do a deal, Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy has some advice<\/a> for you.<\/p>\n

Update 2:<\/b><\/p>\n

Dan Farber of ZDNet (which is part of CNET) notes that the rankings at Alexa and (presumably) comScore only measure CNET.com, but CNET’s family of sites get 137 million uniques<\/a> a month. That’s an order of magnitude larger than the numbers I was using. That suggests TechCrunch might be worth in the neighbourhood of $20-million. Still nothing to sneeze at.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boy, Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget is sure on a roll — or make that a troll. Today he’s got a post about how TechCrunch could be bought by CNET for $100-million or so. His post is actually a response to one by Doug McIntyre at 24\/7 Wall Street, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “CNET to buy TechCrunch — why not?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}