The Tech Media Rollup Continues: CNET x Ziff

Some thoughts on the recently announced merger that will bring CNET and PC Mag under one roof.

While working away from NYC in the quiet green mountains of Vermont, some kinda big news happened. CNET, my longtime alma mater, announced it would be getting its third owner since 2020, courtesy of a proposed acquisition by Ziff Davis, one of the last big tech and enthusiast publishers still standing.

Naturally, I have some thoughts. 

I spent many years at CNET, through multiple iterations of that company. When I joined in 2004, it was an independent, publicly traded company called CNET Networks. 

In 2008, CBS bought CNET Networks for $1.8 billion. This seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, even if it sounds crazy for a digital media company now. Back then, CNET Networks also owned a lot of other properties, like GameSpot and Metacritic, and had valuable URLs like news.com, search.com, and MP3.com. For a quick comparison, George Lucas sold all of Star Wars to Disney in 2012 for a little over $4 billion.

Having lived through that era, CBS was overall a good steward of the brand. But in 2020, in the midst of COVID, CNET was sold to a company called Red Ventures for a reported $500 million. 

@danacknyc#CapCut

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Not a match made in heaven, as RV lost a lot of core CNET staff to layoffs and voluntary departures, including me (I left in 2023 to become the Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo). Now, Red Ventures is selling what's left of CNET to Ziff Davis for somewhere around $100 million.

Much of the analysis of this deal points to how $100 million is obviously less than the $500 million CNET was sold for four years ago, and a lot less than the $1.8 billion from 2008. 

But that's not an entirely accurate picture. Between 2020 and 2024, Red Ventures sold off many parts of the larger CNET organization, like GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, and TechRepublic. At CNET, it dismantled most of the news and video teams, leaving a much smaller staff. 

All that was left of classic CNET was CNET itself and sister site ZDNet (which was originally bought from a different version of Ziff Davis way back in 2000). The company that Red Ventures sold in 2024 is very different from the one it bought in 2020. 

For example, we used to go to CES with around 100 people, including written editorial, video, web producers, video editors, and copy editors. In recent years, CNET has only sent a handful of people, and gave up its decades-long show floor stage.  

Despite all this, I feel like it's a good move for both the CNET brand, which is still a great resource, and for everyone left at CNET, who are still some of the best in the field, especially for product news and reviews. Ziff Davis knows how to be a steward of media brands. They've done better with some brands than others, but they want to be in the tech media space, and a lot of other companies frankly don't.

Five or six years ago, considering the relative sizes of CNET and Ziff Davis and PCMag, this would have been unimaginable. But if there's an ideal home for CNET right now, Ziff Davis is probably at the top of the list. It's a bit like when small and mid-size local newspapers discovered they were better off being owned by Gannett, compared to being bought and gutted by hedge funds.

Hopefully, bringing together all these brands under the same roof creates a lot of synergy and opportunities for collaboration. The big concern, of course, is redundancies and layoffs. But that's not a certainty. For example, Gizmodo was recently sold to a French media company with no previous US presence, and by all accounts it's been run well without laying people off.

Ironically, back in the '90s, the first website I worked at was UGO.com, which once competed with gaming and pop culture site IGN. Both brands changed hands many times and both eventually ended up under Ziff Davis. UGO was mothballed in 2013, but I still hang out with the guys I worked with back then. So, who knows? Maybe someday we'll all work for Ziff Davis, and maybe that'll be okay.