Effectively, Ars Technica is now part of Wired. Look for an official announcement next week.

This marks a new beginning for Ars Technica, which was originally founded in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher (based in Boston) and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes (based in Chicago). They, along with their 8 or so employees, will remain with the company as it is integrated into Wired Digital.

Comscore says Ars Technica has just 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views, but our understanding is that the actual number of unique visitors to the site is around 4.5 million. The audience demographic is very similar to Wired, although our sources say the overlap is relatively small.

This is also another lost customer for Federated Media Publishing, which sells advertising for Ars Technica (Digg left Federated Media last year to accept a very lucrative Microsoft deal that will pay out over $100 million over three years). CondéNet will now take over advertising sales.

The guys over at Ars Technica must have some free time. Seems Ben Kuchera took time out of his day to hook up an NES, two NES clones, and a Wii (Virtual Console) and tested the original Super Mario Bros. game for quality. Sure enough, like all good fanboys would, the Wii was chosen as the best looking console. Gee, didn’t see that coming. Says Ben:

“I know the Virtual Console pictures are unfair—it’s a $250 system hooked up through component—but if you have the means, this is certainly the way to go. It makes your NES games look beautiful, and that may help me justify the cost of buying the games again”

Though I hate the Wii, yes, the game does look the best on the Wii’s Virtual Console. Great write up Ben. When you do a four-system test of the hit classic BiasedRunner!, let me know.

Wii fanboy says something about Mario looking awesome on Wii [Ars Technica]