Discovery to pay $250 million for HowStuffWorks.com with video focusnews, video, television, search engines, finance — by TDavid @ 6:59 am PST
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In 1998 a university professor from North Carolina created a site that focused on providing exhaustive descriptions of how stuff works.
Nine years later, Discovery, the folks behind Animal Planet and Discovery Channel are paying $250 million for all those juicy Google search results.
Acquiring HowStuffWorks will give Discovery the online firepower it has been lacking, Mr. Zaslav says. He wants to make the site, which draws about 3.8 million unique U.S. users a month, according to comScore Media Metrix, the foundation of Discovery’s digital push. HowStuffWorks says it has 11 million users globally.
A search query at this blog for ‘howstuffworks.com’ results in two links, the most recent link in February on how beer goggles work (pictured) and the first link in August 2003 showing how mood rings work. HowStuffWorks is a good site with solid content. It’s nice to see a payday for a site with good content.
IP Democracy digs deeper into Discovery’s plans, which will focus on video specifically:
HowStuffWorks is planning to embed videos from Discovery’s various channels as well as serve as an oulet for the display of new short-form videos that could very well turn into long-form series for Discovery’s cable networks if they prove to be popular or sticky enough.
I think the relationship will work better using HowStuffWorks content on the TV shows than trying to focus on video content from the TV show. Here’s an even better idea: take user submitted how stuff works like content and put it on TV — now that would be good for both. At the least Discovery needs to make it easy to embed in websites a la YouTube rather than forcing people to view only at HowStuffWorks. The ironic thing is Google and other search engines still don’t provide good search of the content inside videos.
Mathew Ingram points out that Discovery also purchased Treehugger for $10 million. The $250 million is Discovery’s biggest purchase to date.
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I agree on both counts — yay for HSW, and that the video angle is an odd match. Not just that Discovery needs to make their stuff more portable, HSW does too. It’s not HSW’s strong suit, nor is the social web which is what you’d think Discovery would be in the market for. More on HSW’s trajectory in the past couple of years over [see signature]
Comment by Dave C. — October 15, 2007 @ 9:34 am PST
Thank you for stopping by and leaving a comment, Dave C. That’s interesting that you used to work for HSW. How big was their staff at the time? How big is it now? I was under the impression it was Marshall Brain writing most of the stuff there but it seems they grew well past that into sort of a group blog like atmosphere?
Comment by TDavid — October 15, 2007 @ 11:32 am PST
It’s actually been a while since Marshall was the main writer. He was in the early days, but it’s gone through lots of phases. Tom Harris wrote a great deal of the content for a good long while after Marshall, and some of the best “classic HSW” articles on the site in my opinion. And then for a period there were 3 or 4 staff writers, a stable of freelancers, and a few editors. Someone who works there now could answer better what their approach is today.
Glad to see another reCaptcha user, btw. I love that thing.
Comment by Dave C. — October 15, 2007 @ 12:33 pm PST