Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica (ranked #5 all time on the BloggerBoard), we’ve confirmed. The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb). Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006). The acquisition price will not be disclosed, but our sources say it is in the $25 million range, which is what Condé Nast paid for Wired.com in 2006. 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. CrunchBase Information Ars Technica Condé Nast Ken “Caesar” Fisher Jon “Hannibal” Stokes Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Just as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft regularly by startups to fill in gaps in their technology or business, media companies may be starting to do the same on the content side. Today, CondeNet (the digital arm of magazine publisher Conde Nast) bought SFO Media, which operates two travel blogs: Jaunted and HotelChatter. The first is a travel guide and the second is a hotel-review blog. The price of the deal wasn’t disclosed, but SFO Media founder Mark Johnson is basically being hired to keep running the sites, which will continue to run separately but be combined with Concierge.com business. It can use the help. Concierge.com’s worldwide unique visitors (blue line in chart below) dropped from a peak of 2 million last October to 700,000 last March, according to comScore. (Part of this decline can be attributed to the seasonal nature of the travel business). Meanwhile, the combined worldwide traffic of Jaunted (red line) and HotelChatter (green line) in March was about 875,000 unique visitors. So two mildly successful blogs just doubled the advertising inventory that Concierge.com’s sales people can sell. → Read More
Digital media fingerprinting technologies are quickly becoming part of every media company’s arsenal when it comes to combating copyright infringement on the Web. So far, most media companies have used the technology primarily as an enforcement tool, in conjunction with their subpeona machines. But CondéNet, the online arm of Condé Nast magazines, is looking for ways to use digital fingerprinting technology beyond merely arming their copyright lawyers. CondéNet is the latest media company to sign on as customer of Attributor (a startup I profiled earlier here) to see who across the Web is taking large chunks of text from CondéNet properties such as Epicurious.com, Style.com, Men.Style.com, and Concierge.com, without attribution or even so much as a link. Attributor is a reporting and tracking service that indexes a site’s content and finds copies of it on the Web. CondéNet president Sarah Chubb signed on, she says, to get a better handle on how CondéNet content is being repurposed on the Web, In most cases, all she wants is a link back to the original site and she is even considering using the tool to find new syndication and advertising opportunities. In an e-mail, she explains her motives: – We would like to see what our unknown distribution is. – We’re not intending any sort of legal action unless someone is using our content in a way that could be damaging to us – We do intend to contact the sites that are using our content to ask them to do one of a few things. On the most basic level we want attribution and a link. There might be other opportunities, with larger-traffic sites, to do some sort of ad deal with a rev share. If we find very high quality sites with a particular affinity and audience that lines up with our own verticals we might discuss a closer ad deal, as we have with the blog Sartorialist and men.style.com. So it is fairly open ended but starts with us understanding what is out there. That is certainly a much more enlightened view than we’ve seen so far from most big media companies, who confine access to their digital fingerprinting technology to their lawyers. Give these tools to business folks instead, and they will find new ways to make money in the future instead of trying to protect revenues from the past. CondeNet has much more to gain from generating → Read More
Owners of Bravia HDTVs are getting a slew of Internet video channels if you have the Bravia Internet Video Link, which is a ‘small module’ that attaches itself to the back of the TV and is hooked up to the Web via Ethernet. Eight new channels will be offered including content from blip.tv, Sony Pictures, CondéNet, and Sports Illustrated. The latter will offer this year’s annual swimsuit issue with videos, interviews and other special coverage this month. Actual sports content will be offered at a later date. CondéNet, the Internet unit of Condé Nast Publications, will offer four channels ranging from fashion to lifestyle content from style.com and men.style.com as well as travel and food/dining content. Blip.tv will showcase the best of user-generated content sites from various outlets like Break a Leg and Geek Entertainment TV. The Bravia Internet Video Link is available now for $300. Press Release → Read More
Guys… Guys… Graydon, wake up. Listen. These [air quotes]social network[air quotes] things are soooooo hot. They’re really popular with children — who has kids here? Nobody? Ok, we got some, don’t worry. Paula, we do not want to hear about your uterine journey, no, just wait… later. At the Holiday Party. Sure. Slides. Whatever. — and our magazines are dying… Wired team, are you listening? This is for you. You guys like computers! So we’re doing Flip.com for girls. They’ll use it to connect to each other in… erm… how did those Estonian programmers put it? … meta-computational network of close-knit interactions using multimedia and high bandwidth social services including high quality video, image upload and processing, and just chillin’, yo. Can we pay attention, people? I have five girls outside this room. I want you to ask them what’s cool and we’ll write it down, send it to the copy editor, funnel it through legal and accounting, and then run it up to Anna who will then send it back to legal for a brush up and then we’ll send it to Estonia via FedEx and they’ll type in the content. Are we go? Team? Go? I am so LiveJournaling this! Flip.com will offer girls a forum to create “flip books”: multimedia scrapbooks of photographs, home-made music videos and other postings. CondeNet hopes to tap into the same creative flair that girls show when they decorate their school lockers or textbooks. The site is Conde Nast’s answer to News Corp.’s MySpace, which — along with similiar sites such as Facebook — is drawing millions of young users and has made it difficult for magazine publishers to keep teenagers’ attention. To Lure Teens to Its Latest Web Site, Conde Nast Turns to the ‘Flip Squad’ [WSJ] → Read More
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. → Read More
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