Ownership rundown: who owns who in tech pubs
Lots of media buys going down lately — some solid, others a little harder to see. But for better or worse, in the last couple of years the new media market’s definitely trending heavily on the corporate-acquired end of things. Just for grins, let’s take a quick look at who owns who. Note: this is by no means an exhaustive list (nor does it include aggregators like Techmeme or Digg), just a few of the popular editor editor-driven tech sites on my radar.
Owned
Ars Technica - CondéNet (Condé Nast)
Crave - CNET (CBS)
Engadget - AOL (Time Warner)
Slashdot - SourceForge, Inc.
Wired blogs (Danger Room, Epicenter, etc.) - CondéNet (Condé Nast)
Independent
BoingBoing - Happy Mutants, LLC
GigaOM - GigaOmni Media
Gizmodo - Gawker Media
PaidContent - ContentNext Media, Inc.
Silicon Alley Insider - Silicon Alley Insider, Inc
TechCrunch - Interserve, Inc.
VentureBeat - VentureBeat, Inc.
Independent, on hire
Fake Steve Jobs - Forbes
Scobleizer - FastCompany (Mansueto Ventures, LLC)
Nice overview Ryan.
It’s funny to see how (tech)blogs are becoming the new TV-stations and newspapers on the media-ownership markets. Would you or Peter ever imagined working for AOL?
The nice thing about the internet however is it’s low threshold for new startups. So should something go very wrong in the future (like one or two corps owning all popular sites, Murdoch-wise) there will always be the possibility to visit (or start it yourself) an independent source. At least thats my own romantic vision.
I’m writing my PhD thesis about user powered news selection on the internet through tagclouds (folksonomies), comparing them to printed newspapers. Very nice to see there’s a difference in news selection. So news (tech news for sure) on the internets has a bright and shining future.
Comment by Tequila — Tuesday, May 20, 2008 @ 1:04 am