FOLIO: Section Blogs by M and A and Finance

Rumor Mill: Penton May Be Cygnus Buyer

Jason Fell — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:53:54 -0400

The latest gossip surrounding the apparent impending sale of Cygnus Business Media is that Penton Media (probably backed by parent Wasserstein & Co.) is the buyer. Today might be the final day of the due diligence process, according to three sources, all of whom are former Cygnus employees who heard the rumblings second hand.

When asked for comment, a Penton spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to FOLIO: that Penton has “nothing to say at this point.”

DeSilva + Phillips managing partner Reed Phillips—who along with fellow managing partner Roland DeSilva spoke with Cygnus co-CEO Carr Davis in a closed-door meeting last month—said he could not confirm the rumors.

If the buyer is in fact Penton/Wasserstein, one M&A source, who wished to remain anonymous, said the interest would make sense. “Wasserstein had an interest in Cygnus when it was on the block a couple of years ago. To acquire Cygnus, you have to be comfortable with a wide-ranging b-to-b company that serves a range of verticals, which obviously they are with Penton.”

Cygnus went on the block in 2006 but subsequently pulled off the market that year.

The source suggested that Cygnus could be asking for about $200 million to $240 million, or about 8x estimated EBITDA.

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Felix Dennis in Deal Talks With American Magazine

Dylan Stableford — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:33:34 -0400

Felix Dennis—entrepreneur, founder of Maxim, publisher of the Week, poet, author and, depending on who you believe, would-be murderer—has a new book out. It’s called How to Get Rich—an unlikely entrant into the frothy, cluttered self-help/motivational category.

I recently conducted a wide-ranging interview with Dennis on the state of the magazine industry, and his place in it, which will be published on FOLIOmag.com later this week.

In the meantime, here’s a somewhat juicy excerpt about a deal Dennis is trying to close—buying the rights to a “well-known” American magazine. Apparently, he’s just hammering out the terms of what he calls “schmuck insurance.”

FELIX DENNIS: I’m sorry we had to delay this call. We’re in the middle of a deal.

FOLIO:: Oh you are?

DENNIS: Yeah we are.

FOLIO:: Can you discuss it at all?

DENNIS: We’re trying to buy the worldwide rights of a well-known American magazine while leaving the North American rights with the parent company. Obviously, because there are no contracts, I can’t tell you what the magazine is but we’re busy doing that. We sort of think it’s a win-win for everybody. This is a big company, a sensible company, but they do not engage in much worldwide activity. They’ve got a good title that will do well in places like India, China, Russia. But they need someone to go and do it. And we’re not going to do it unless we own it. And that means shared ownership. And it has happened before. I still share ownership of Computer Shopper, if you can believe it. Computer Shopper’s made tens of millions of pounds over the years. I own the rights to Computer Shopper in Britain and elsewhere. Yet the North American rights were held for years by Ziff Davis. I honestly don’t know if it’s still published over there or who owns it. So that did work. And then there was Stuff, which I launched after Maxim here. And I only had the North and South American rights to do that, because I had sold Stuff worldwide to a company in Britain called Haymarket who are big publishers over there. So they published Stuff all the way around the world, and I published it here in America.

FOLIO:: Well, you’ve got my wheels spinning now.

DENNIS: You won’t be able to guess, I promise you. Well, I don’t think you will atoll. It’s one you wouldn’t expect me to be involved in. But then I have published a very wide variety of magazines. And it’s a perfectly respectable and totally tedious magazine in a way. It’s not one that will get your juices going. It’s just that I know the magazine does well here—very well, and has a lot of money over the years. And it’s in an excellent market, that is, it’s not in a declining market. And it would just do well around the world if money was invested in it abroad. And not only in its paper form, but in its electronic form and its digital form around the world. And it needs that investment. So we’re hoping to be able to eventually conclude a deal.

FOLIO:: What’s the timeframe?

DENNIS: I would expect this deal to be signed within the next two months. I suspect the American parent company will insist, and I suspect rightly, that if we flip this magazine within the next five or ten years, that if we sell it off for a huge profit, that they get a piece of that, even though they’ve sold it to us. I believe that in American hedge fund parlance, and in venture capitalist parlance, this is called ‘schmuck insurance.’ [Laughs] So they don’t look like a schmuck. [Laughs.] I love that term—I had never heard it before. So that’s what we’ve been busy doing.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The full interview with Dennis will be published on FOLIOmag.com later this week.]
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Cygnus Sale Looming?

Jason Fell — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:47:25 -0400

Rumors have been swirling about the potential sale of Cygnus Business Media since co-CEOs Tony O’Brien and Carr Davis [pictured], in an interview with FOLIO: last month, indicated that the company is exploring a sale.
According to three sources contacted by FOLIO:, the Cygnus corporate management team was in New York for about a week recently, most likely meeting with prospective buyers. Now, sources say a buyer has stepped up and that (as early as today) Cygnus is moving toward the due diligence phase of negotiations.
Is the buyer from private equity or another publisher? So far, I haven’t been able to substantiate the rumors.
A Cygnus spokesperson declined to comment other than to point out that Davis already has said that the company has been approached with inquiries and is exploring “a process.” Cygnus went on the block in 2006 but subsequently pulled off the market that year.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out—and what sort of return owner ABRY Partners will see.
Check back to foliomag.com for more on this developing story.
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UPDATE: Indie Magazine Asks Readers for $20,000 by July 1

Jason Fell — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:24:45 -0400

UPDATE: It appears the magazine got the cash it needed.

Arthur magazine is almost dead.

When logging onto the self-proclaimed “transgenerational global counterculture” music magazine’s Web site today I was redirected to a page asking for a monetary donation. Arthur, according to the page, “will die” if it doesn’t raise $20,000 by July 1.

In a note posted online, Arthur editor/owner Jay Babcock indicated that after buying out his ex-partner and relaunching the magazine about a year ago, he “maxed out” his personal and business credit cards. Like other struggling publishers, Babcock attributes Arthur’s financial woes to lower than expected ad revenues and increased production and distribution costs.

“We have worked very hard with very little resources: some of us could afford to work pro bono, others could afford to work at well below market, still others couldn’t afford to work for Arthur but did it anyway,” Babcock wrote. “Still, we have bills to pay, and debt to service. Starting up again costs money. And my credit cards are now maxed out.”

Launched in 2002, Arthur is a free bi-monthly magazine distributed in various places like record shops, used bookstores, coffeehouses and art galleries. As of this afternoon, they apparently had collected $15,600.

Arthur isn’t the first to extend a hand to readers to help pay the bills. Following last July’s shape-based postal rate restructuring, The Nation, a political weekly with a circulation of 181,070, saw its rates go up 18 to 20 percent—and turned to subscriber donations to remain in business.

It’s a shame, and disheartening, that Arthur, like many well-respected magazines, finds itself in this predicament. While I’m not intimately familiar with the magazine’s specific financial details I can only assume that it would have been beneficial to give itself more than about a week to raise $20,000.

I guess time will tell if Arthur survives. The clock is ticking.
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Is Condé Nast in Talks to Buy Rolling Stone?

Dylan Stableford — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:52:00 -0400

Near the end of an otherwise unremarkable interview with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner (both of whom have developed what I'll refer to henceforth as "caricature coifs") about an upcoming Hunter S. Thompson documentary, PBS' Charlie Rose slipped in this little question, rather nonchalantly I might add:
“So what's this story that Condé Nast wants to buy Rolling Stone?”
Here’s the video:

Fast-forward to 32:10 to hear their coy, befuddled yet uncomfortable responses.
I e-mailed Maurie Perl at Condé Nast for comment. We'll see if there is one.
If true, though, this would fall under the "developing" tag, and a big one at that.
[As always, drop me a line—dylan AT red7media DOT com or 203.899.8481—if you have any intel on this or any other deal in the works.]
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Cygnus Co-CEOs in Penthouse Meeting

Dylan Stableford — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:56:17 -0400

SEE RELATED: Cygnus Exploring a Sale
I met with Cygnus’ co-CEOs, Tony O’Brien and Carr Davis [right], today at the Kitano hotel in New York. They confirmed the company is exploring a possible sale. (Click here for the full report.)

Shortly after the interview, two of the industry’s leading M&A brokers, Reed Phillips and Roland DeSilva, walked into the lobby and were whisked by Davis to a closed-door meeting in a penthouse conference room.

This story, as they say, is developing ... perhaps sooner than later.
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Is Time Inc. Inching Toward a Sale?

Dylan Stableford — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:03:03 -0400

Addressing a media conference in London, Time Inc.'s chief financial officer John Martin said he expects the Time Inc. publishing unit to be a "growth business," despite a "difficult secular environment" in print advertising, according to a Marketwatch report. Here's the important part: "Digital revenues are now close to 15% of all revenues at Time Inc.":

Martin did not rule out the sale of certain magazine titles, but added that one thing necessary to make the business grow is "economies of scale," and thus Time Inc. must maintain a strong roster of publications.

It seems like every time a Time Warner executive speaks about the future of Time Inc., it's in decidedly cryptic drips and drabs, and no real numbers attached. So Martin's were, at once, refreshing/maddening.

But he's clearly been following the path Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner CEO [pictured], his boss, has been laying out ahead of him. Here's what Bewkes said in February:

"We're good at publishing. We're a leader in the industry. It's a good business we think. As it expands out beyond print into digital we think it can turn into a growth business," Bewkes said, adding that keeping Time Inc. intact "depend[s] on our being able to demonstrate that to ourselves and our investors."

All of this is reason enough to dust off this post, entitled "What a Time Inc. Spin-Off Might Look Like."
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Dykstra's Double Trouble

Dylan Stableford — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:09:28 -0400

You cannot be serious! Dykstra, John McEnroe at the Players Club launch last month.
Last week, Lenny Dykstra, the ex-Met turned carwash millionaire and stock svengali, sued Doubledown Media, the company he hired to help launch the Players Club, the magazine for professional athletes which launched last month. Doubledown filed a counterclaim against Dykstra in federal court on Tuesday.

For those of you who enjoy reading sordid details of business deals gone sour (even one involving your boyhood New York Mets idol ... sniff ... sigh) this one is a doozy.

Click here for the PDF.
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Shaky Times at ALM

Jason Fell — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:51:04 -0400

Ever since British acquisition firm Incisive Media purchased U.S.-based ALM last July for $630 million, it seemed that the Apax Partners subsidiary was on the fast track, quickly evolving from an entrepreneurial startup to a b-to-b powerhouse.

Now, it seems there is some apprehension from inside—mostly about revenues. Is the legal market not as recession-proof as once thought?

Earlier this month, ALM slashed 42 jobs across the board. The company apparently is scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media's Florida publication into a monthly magazine and is shifting Law Firm, Inc. from print to online only.

Below, via Gawker, is an internal memo from ALM CEO Bill Pollak [pictured above]:
Folks,
Several weeks ago, I wrote to you about our business results for the first quarter of 2008 and shared some of the challenges we face as a result of the credit squeeze and other market factors. I also described our intention to tighten our belts and reduce costs. With no change in sight on the economic horizon, the senior management team and I have spent the past few weeks examining our business options. Our goal was to find solutions that would lower expenses without compromising quality, and which would allow us to continue to invest in and meet our long term business goals. In particular, we all strongly agree on the need to continue investing in our Web infrastructure, while expanding ALM's ability to generate and publish content online.
We looked at each business with these questions in mind: Are we getting the right return on our investment? Do we need to keep doing this work? Can we do this work another way? We believe that while we are primarily doing the right work in the right way, there are changes we need to make immediately to respond to economic conditions.
Some of these changes involve revising the timing or scope of planned initiatives. Others, however, are staff related and go beyond simply delaying the filling of open jobs. In total, we have decided to eliminate forty-two current positions across ALM and Incisive's US operations. These staff reductions are distributed across businesses, locations and job levels and all the employees involved have already been notified.
The business changes we will be making are also broad in scope. These include scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media's Florida publication into a monthly magazine; closing down the Operations Department of Incisive's Norwalk, CT. office; and shifting Law Firm, Inc. from a print magazine to a digital product.
Another change in business strategy - and the one that will have the greatest impact on staff - is our decision to restructure ALM's Event Division and reassign management responsibility for many of our existing SRI conferences to Insight in Canada, Incisive's Events group in London and ALM's Legal Publishing Division. A number of SRI's financial events will be eliminated.
Accepting and working through change is never easy, and changes that affect our colleagues and friends can be particularly painful. We did not make these decisions lightly. But we know that our future success depends on our ability to align ourselves with our markets and clients, and to ensure we have the resources we need to develop and grow our brands. The changes announced today will not only help us during the current economic turbulence, but will make us stronger in the future.
As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note at
[Redacted].
Bill

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Gawker Media Trims Three Blogs from Portfolio

Dylan Stableford — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:51:55 -0400

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton (and FOLIO: 40 alum) has always thought of his snarky blog network as something of a Condé Nast of the blogosphere. Now, after months of speculation, Denton has trimmed three titles from his portfolio—selling his music blog, Idolator, to Buzznet (which recently purchased Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum), travel blog Gridskipper to Curbed (the real estate blog network—helmed by former Gawker managing editor Lockhart Steele—in which Gawker Media is an investor) and Washington, D.C.-based Wonkette to managing editor Ken Layne.
Denton's e-mail to staffers:
I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and-this one may be a surprise-Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!
* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group.
* GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder.
* WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web's very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.
Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.
Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.
I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup-and Patric's bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.
And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty's sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone. I'm [redacted] and Noah is on [redacted].

Regards

Nick

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GAWKER MEDIA KEY FACTS
* A dozen sites, Gizmodo first launched in August 2002, most recent, io9, in January 2008
* Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Defamer, Jezebel, Valleywag, io9, Consumerist, Fleshbot
* A record 18 "Bloggie" nominations in 2008, way more than any other blog collective (one of those was for Idolator)
* Audience of 29.7m unique visitors a month for the whole network, up 82% at annualized rate (http://www.quantcast.com/p-d4P3FpSypJrlA)
* Each individual site has at least 1m uniques or, in the case of io9, soon will
* Pageviews of 227m in March — 219m if you take out the three sites being spun out — up 89% on a year earlier (Sitemeter)
* For those who measure these things, Gawker is the web's leading independent blog group
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Credit Market Making Publishers Nervous

Jason Fell — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:47:46 -0400

Less than a week after its 21st annual media conference wrapped up in Florida, investment firm giant Bear Stearns Co. was sold Monday to rival JP Morgan Chase & Co. for $240 million—or just $2 per share, a 90 percent loss to what the company was worth a week ago.

Although the dramatic news doesn't have a direct impact on the magazine industry (unless Bear Stearns owes your business money, of course), it does have Wall Street traders up in arms again in a credit market that has former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan—who some blame for the housing market fallout—calling the current U.S. economic crisis the "most wrenching since the end of the second world war."

Capital markets across all industries, including media investors, are nervous about yesterday's news—and for good reason. "Every time that we think that we've seen the bottom of the credit market, something like this happens and we see that it can get much, much worse," Veronis Suhler Stevenson managing partner Tom Kemp told me during a phone conversation this morning. "Every time these things happen, the credit approval process becomes more difficult, leverage will be tougher and pricing will be higher."

The Bear Stearns acquisition "certainly casts a gloomy outlook over where the markets and economy are headed," DeSilva + Phillips managing partner Reed Phillips says.

Kemp and Phillips are right. What's going to come of situations like that with Reed Elsevier announcing plans to divest business sector magazine publisher Reed Business Information? A number of potential suitors have emerged, but is there really a strategic buyer out there willing to pony up $2-2.5 billion now?

We'll have to wait and see.
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Why No One’s Gonna Buy Your Blog

Dylan Stableford — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:24:07 -0500

I'm on the record here as being in favor of hiring away other people's bloggers ("Coveting Thy Neighbor's Blogger") and there was an entertaining Internet dust-up this week about the next logical step: whether or not big media companies should buy big blogs.

The recap:

Jeff Segal on breakingviews.com thinks that media companies should steer clear of buying blogs right now because of some obvious risks. Blogs are tough to value, dependent on writers with individual fan bases and also notoriously faddish. On top of that, he takes a gratuitous swing at Gawker.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio mag's Market Movers blog thinks that Segal is "hilariously off base" and "utterly clueless." He sees plenty of comparable transactions (Engadget, Freakonomics) and the big blogs have good, old-fashioned revenue as a starting point for valuations. He also points out that many big blogs (including Gawker) have thrived after the departure of their founding editors. Salmon says that acquisition discussions are going on all the time and, once buyers' and sellers' price expectations cross, we'll start seeing some big blog acquisitions.

Gawker itself chimes in with hastily composed rundown of the reasons why a few of the biggest blogs will never be acquired. Gawker: too outsider-y. TechCrunch: really just one guy. BoingBoing: really just three guys and a gal. Weblogs.inc: already acquired.

Based on my experience over the past six month, Segal comes closest to the crux of the current M&A market: e-media companies (including blogs) do have estimable valuations, but those valuations are too flippin' high. Like 1999 high.

More than one company has recently expressed to me that their value expectation starts at "$10-20 per unique visitor" and goes up from there. In this environment, traditional media players have a couple of options:

1. Get in on the land grab. Discovery Networks is a great example of this, with their Treehugger and HowStuffWorks acquisitions. Valuations be damned, if you're a multi-billion dollar cable network about to go public, you can pay up for these properties and accelerate your online strategy to light speed.

2. Invest in your own site instead. Most people I talk to (who are not multi-billion dollar cable networks) think that valuations have to come down. In the meantime, if you have a sub-$15 CPM, you're likely to get a better return on a $5 million investment in your in-house product than the same money spent on a site with 300,000 to 500,000 uniques.

So Segal ends up being laughably wrong on all the specifics but right on the recommendation. Everybody but the deepest pockets probably has to wait for valuations to come down.
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Are E-Media Companies—With Revenue—More Valuable?

Bill Mickey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:15:10 -0500

This post by FOLIO: editor Dylan Stableford on Glam Media and its CEO Samir Arora makes two insights into e-media M&A:

"If traditional publishers continue to miss the site network strategy, as Arora says, I'd expect that line of ‘approachers' to start looking like the runway at JFK, probably sooner than later. And when it does, it'll be a fun exercise in valuation."
Arora says he's already getting a significant amount of interest from tire-kickers and the supposition that the crowd of curious buyers will soon resemble a packed runway is dead on. Media bankers DeSilva + Phillips have already labeled 2007 as the "year of the digital niche acquisition," and this year is shaping up to be more of the same.
What's more, Arora is actually generating revenues. "Our internal goal has been to drive the revenue growth rate faster than any other media company on the Internet--traditional or nontraditional," Arora told me in our original interview.
Whether or not Glam's revenues are developing at a scale or speed buyers are looking for, that model is something both potential strategic and financial buyers will no doubt appreciate, given the smokey back room approach to early-stage e-media valuations.
With the credit markets as tight as they are these days, buyers may not be as willing to pay whatever it takes to win a bid. And in a deal for a property that has proven financials, a bidder pool would likely expand to include even the more conservative buyers who normally shy away from early-stage Internet companies that have no measurables to pin a valuation on beyond site traffic, demographics, an executive team still in their 20s, and a great idea.
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FCC's Copps Worried About Big Media Private Equity Deals

Bill Mickey — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:32:00 -0500

Smart Money picked up a Dow Jones story reporting that Michael Copps, a Democrat and member of the Federal Communications Commission, is voicing a growing concern over the big private equity deals—particularly in media. Seems he's a bit skittish over the volume and size of these deals over the last year, especially in light of the subprime fallout and a grim economic outlook for the coming year.

"There's been a whole raft (of acquisitions) involving private equity in recent years and I think we need to ask questions about them," said Copps, who also believes that ownership structures are becoming unclear, which apparently makes it tougher for the FCC to crack down on companies when something goes wrong.

FCC chairman and Republican Kevin Martin so far is downplaying Copps' concerns.

Nevertheless, Copps is exposing what might be a tricky year for over-leveraged deals, and a situation that might work its way into all sorts of corners in the private equity deal landscape.
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Glam.com Founder: We'll Talk to Anyone, But We're Not Looking to Sell—Yet

Dylan Stableford — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:27:52 -0500

Great FOLIO: cover story this month on Glam.com and its pink-leaning founder, Samir Arora. The company is still somehow under the radar, despite its absurd traffic growth (25 million unique visitors a month across its network of 400 sites) and rank (ComScore places it among the top 25 Internet media companies).

One point that didn’t make it into the article but came out during a video shoot we did with Samir for FOLIOmag.com this week: he’s not looking to flip the company. At least, not yet. From rough notes I took during the interview:
FOLIO: I’d imagine, given all the success you’ve had in a relatively short period of time, you get approached a lot by some of this traditional media companies you’re kind of competing with.

ARORA: Yes, we do get approached, every month ... nothing serious ... but that wasn’t the goal. We want to create a great brand ... one that will have tremendous value in the marketplace.
If traditional publishers continue to miss the site network strategy, as Arora says, I’d expect that line of “approachers” to start looking like the runway at JFK, probably sooner than later. And when it does, it’ll be a fun exercise in valuation.
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