How Stuff Works, the “not yet profitable” web property owned by investor Carl Icahn and others, will be acquired by Discovery Communications for $250 million.
The deal highlights how established media companies increasingly are expanding on the Web through targeted acquisitions instead of building their own sites, a strategy that largely has failed.
“We’re way behind in new media and digital,” says Chief Executive David Zaslav, who has shaken up Discovery since taking over in January. “I don’t think we win just by building vertically.”
Discovery initially plans to marry HowStuffWorks’s text content with the network’s more than 100,000 hours of documentary and other video footage.
How Stuff Works was founded in 1998 by Marshall Brain, a professor from North Carolina.
[via The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.)]
