New Delhi: According to reports, international news giant CNN, a unit of Time Warner, is in talks to acquire the social news website Mashable for $200 million. Mashable, an American news website and news blog founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005, specialises in technology and social media. However the blog now also covers business and entertainment. Mashable is said to have over 15 million monthly visitors and 4 million social media followers across Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
The Reuters blogger Felix Salmon has learned from an unnamed source that CNN will buy social media website Mashable for more than $200 million. The source said that the announcement is expected for Tuesday.
There is also a social media hint about this acquisition. Reportedly, Adam Ostrow, the executive editor of Mashable, "liked" Salmon's story for Reuters on Facebook.
However, according to New York Times, officials at CNN denied that an announcement would be made on Tuesday. Also, spokespeople from both CNN and Mashable declined to comment on the potential acquisition.
But if it happens, this will be CNN.com's largest acquisition till date.
Last August, CNN acquired Zite, a company that made an iPad app to determine what its users want to read and view, for a price calculated to be between $20 million and $25 million.
If the rumours turn out to be true, this will be the latest in the chain of tech news site purchases. The trend began with AOL, when it purchased popular technology blog TechCrunch in September 2010 for estimated $25 million.
Following this, SAY Media, a digital publishing company headquartered in San Francisco, bought the web tech blog ReadWriteWeb in December last year; and GigaOm purchased ContentNext, paidContent's parent company in February this year.
If CNN acquires Mashable, it will, however, be the highest amount paid for a tech news site. ####
Comments
0 comment