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October 28, 2004
Media Watch: Who is bidding as much as $400m for Marketwatch?
Marketwatch, the publisher of CBS Marketwatch--the news and financial online site--is up for sale with a $400m price tag, says the New York Times. This follows a good quarterly report on Wednesday.
Possible bidders include Viacom, which owns 23 percent; Pearson, (the owner of the Financial Times) which also owns 23 per cent; the New York Times, Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones, and Yahoo.
The use of “possible” means, "I don’t really know . . . but it could be," and so the usual suspects are rounded up. But, let’s look at the likelihood of some of these bids (due by next week).
Let me start with Pearson—-this company is likely a seller not a buyer. The FT Group needs a bit of attention and the money would come in handy. Dow Jones is hurting in different ways, and I would think an unlikely bidder, and so is the New York Times for a variety of reasons.
Yahoo is probably the best fit. Yahoo Finance is a huge product for Yahoo. It knows best out of that entire media group how to monetise online content. And it’s not the first time Yahoo has gone into content production— do you remember it had a type of CNBC type broadband streaming video finance show at one time?
Also, I would think that Cnet might be keeping an interested eye on things--it filed a $300m S3 shelf registration on Tuesday. I know that Cnet has cast an eye on CBS Marketwatch in the not too distant past—-not as an acquisition but as moving into the financial news space. It’s probably a bit too expensive for Cnet to swallow as an acquisition.
For Yahoo, it must decide: is it better to be an independent aggregator of news content and risk alienating some of your content partners—or be a news provider too? I would say that knowing how to be a news aggregator is not a unique skill these days. Having a business group that knows how to produce financial news content is not a bad capability to have IMHO.
And if Marketwatch is acquired--it will be interesting to see the effect on TheStreet.com.
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October 28, 2004 03:42 AM
