A great many publications today are telling the story
of The Discovery Channel‘s owner Discovery’s
plans to acquire HowStuffWorks.com
for a cool $250 million.
How wonderful it is when a news story of an acquisition
involves
an acquirer with an intrinsic interest in the operation it is
acquiring. Not like some strange arrangements – of the eBay-Skype
variety, for instance.
Discovery,
the company with a vested interest in bringing
educational, informative and often scientifically intriguing
productions to
television viewers in the US and elsewhere, across a number of media
channels, is looking to add HowStuffWorks
to its operation.
Discovery
intends to use the site as an outlet for videos the company deems
suitable for consumption by a Web audience.
HowStuffWorks Growing Supply Of Content
HowStuffWorks currently attracts hordes of people due to its
large
and growing supply of content centered around mechanics (obviously),
making it attractive to Discovery not only for its subject matter
(wide-ranging) but the significant amount of traffic it attracts.
HowStuffWorks, according to data compiled by ComScore, draws
3.8
million unique visitors every month in the US. The website claims to
maintain an average usership of 11 million worldwide.
While building an
visitor/viewership from scratch might be somewhat easy for Discovery to
do, having the ability to work with a well-established base such as the
one HowStuffWorks has built since its founding in 1998 is an entry
point certainly worth going after in and of itself.
Infusing The Site With 100,000 Hours Of Video
While Discovery intends for HowStuffWorks to retain its core
component – its encyclopaedic-like text explanations,
tutorials,
animations, etc. – the company also wishes to infuse the site
with
“more than 100,000 hours…of video
footage,” gleaned from documentaries
and other sources of video in its stockpile.
Reversely, Discovery will
likely include various bits from HowStuffWorks into some of its
programming in the future, too.
There’s always a feeling of unease, great or small,
surrounding an
announcement such as this, but I think it’s safe to say
HowStuffWorks
will be in good hands from this point on. When a young start-up is
purchased by a much larger corporation, it’s often seen as
good for the
little guy.
But considering the length of time HowStuffWorks has
remained independent, there undoubtedly exists among many fans that
unspoken, yearning desire to see that it manages to hold onto its
identity while under the auspices of a new parent company.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
