Red Ventures sells CNET to Ziff Davis
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Red Ventures, the digital media and marketing juggernaut based in Fort Mill, South Carolina, is selling tech news and reviews site CNET to Ziff Davis, the publicly-traded digital marketing behemoth, in a deal valued at over $100 million, sources confirmed to Axios.
Why it matters: It's a stunning turn of events for CNET, which bought Ziff Davis — then a tech magazine firm — and its online services company ZDNet, in deal worth roughly $1.6 billion more than two decades ago.
Catch up quick: Ziff Davis today trades publicly with a market value of $1.94 billion and is one of the few healthy digital media and services conglomerates that trades publicly in the U.S.
- The firm has transformed and changed hands many times over the past two decades. It filed for bankruptcy in 2008 after the internet boom gutted many print publications.
- It was acquired by J2, a cloud services provider, in 2012. J2 Global spun off its cloud business in 2021, and renamed its remaining publicly-traded firm Ziff Davis.
Zoom in: The price of the transaction was not immediately learned, but Axios reported in January that Red Ventures was trying to offload the asset for around $250 million.
- Sources Axios spoke with who were approached about the deal noted that the valuation was far too high for what they would be willing to pay.
- Red Ventures didn't immediately return a request for comment. A CNET spokesperson confirmed the deal but did not immediately provide a comment. The New York Times first reported the deal Tuesday.
Flashback: Red Ventures acquired CNET, along with a few smaller websites, from ViacomCBS, now Paramount Global, in 2020 for $500 million.
- Red Ventures sold several of the smaller brands it acquired as part of the CNET deal to Fandom in 2022, including GameSpot, TV Guide and Metacritic.
- It shuttered one of the smaller sites, Chowhound, earlier in 2022, before it was revived by Static Media in 2023.
The big picture: Red Ventures has become one of the largest privately held digital media companies in the country, but its business model never made sense for CNET and the timing was off.
- Red Ventures took on debt to fund the deal, and hoped to grow CNET's business by integrating it into the revenue engine that it uses to fuel its other assets, including Bankrate, The Points Guy, and more.
- But it struggled to integrate CNET, in part because its sales structure was so different. CNET still made most of its money from direct sales, not affiliate commerce.
- Other challenges, including a slower ad market, plunging traffic, raising interest rates and brand reputation issues, plagued CNET's brand.
What to watch: Ziff Davis appears poised to continue its deal streak.
