Discovery Networks have acquired How Stuff Works for $250 million.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Discovery plans to use the site “as the cornerstone of an effort to bring its vast library of video content to the Web.” Discovery previously acquired environmentally focused blog TreeHugger.com for $10 million in August.
How Stuff Works is a long standing provider of edutainment content on the web. The site was founded in 1998 by former North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain, took venture capital at the height of the first web boom in 1999 and was acquired by the Convex Group in 2002.
According to Alexa, How Stuff Works has passed its glory days of popularity, having peaked in 2005 and declined in traffic since then, however the site still ranks in the top 2000 sites online. (Ed.’s note: comScore shows HowStuffWorks with 3.9 million unique U.S. visitors in September, up 74 percent from a year ago, and with 18 million page views, up 40 percent).