South Korean owned Lycos has announced the sale of Wired.com to Condé Naste for $25 million.
Lycos originally paid $83 million for Wired Digital, which included the Wired.com assets. However, Wired Digital also included a number of properties, including HotBot, Hotwired and Webmonkey, that are not being transferred to Condé Naste in this current acquisition.
Conde Naste already owns Wired Magazine, but Wired.com has been a separate company (with separate staff) since a split in 1999. Since the split, Wired Magazine’s sole online distribution has been through a subdomain – Wired.com/wired. With this acquisition, the two companies are together again.
Wired Magazine was founded in 1993, the original team was an all-star cast including John Battelle, author of The Search and now head of blog advertising network Federated Media and Nicholas Negroponte, now head of the hundred dollar laptop project. The magazine was acquired by Conde Nast parent company Advanced Publications in 1998. A stock deal took the online component out of its hands the next year.