BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
18 Jun 2008

If NBCU gets Weather.com, it propels itself into a Top 10 media property… From Alley Insider:

1. Google / 128 million unique visitors
2. Microsoft / 123 million
3. Yahoo / 116 million
4. Time Warner / 108 million
5. News Corp. / 79 million
6. eBay / 66 million
7. InterActiveCorp. / 65 million
8. Wikimedia Foundation / 57 million
9. Amazon / 55 million
10. NBC Universal / 51.2 million (estimated unduplicated audience after Weather.com acquisition)

This is worth nothing, because this combo would incidentally be pushing New York Times off the list.  We’ve already noted how NYT is the largest newspaper company on the Web.  This is not surprising, for a supposedly dying business, NYT seems to be doing a lot of cool and smart things online.  The problem is, it’s not doing enough, and what it is doing, it is not doing fast enough.  But at least it is doing something, which is more than some other firms in their peer group.

Anyway, back to NBCU, this is not immaterial, because CBS’ recent acquisition of CNET had numerous purposes, none of which was more important than propelling CBS into a Top 10 media property:

CBS said it would combine those assets with its existing Internet properties, which would make CBS / CNET one of the top 10 U.S. Web firms with 54 million monthly users.

CBS has been assiduously building its Web presence over the past 18 months, since bringing in Silicon Valley deal maker Quincy Smith to lead its strategy. In addition to CBS-branded Web properties, it has launched a content and ad network of 300 sites. CBS has also made several smaller acquisitions, such as finance video blog Wallstrip, high-school sports destination MaxPreps.com and music discovery site last.fm.

While social networks are the hot properties of the moment, CBS is doubling down on premium content, Smith said, anticipating a greater shift of brand ad dollars online.

“It’s a business that’s easy for CBS to understand,” he said. “The bulk of the [online ad] revenue has been search. What else is there? CNET is making a good living off online content.”

You see where this is going: it’s gobble or be gobbled season.  This is all nice and dandy, and both CNET and Weather.com bring a lot to the table beyond eyeballs and traffic…

With so much cash to play with and eroding revenues in their traditional offline businesses, Big Media will continue to acquire but also start to look at generating revenues from the underlying assets they buy.