Wired News and Magazine reunited by sale
Marshall Kirkpatrick
15 comments »
South Korean owned Lycos has announced the sale of Wired.com to Condé Naste for $25 million.
Lycos originally paid $83 million for Wired Digital, which included the Wired.com assets. However, Wired Digital also included a number of properties, including HotBot, Hotwired and Webmonkey, that are not being transferred to Condé Naste in this current acquisition.
Conde Naste already owns Wired Magazine, but Wired.com has been a separate company (with separate staff) since a split in 1999. Since the split, Wired Magazine’s sole online distribution has been through a subdomain - Wired.com/wired. With this acquisition, the two companies are together again.
Wired Magazine was founded in 1993, the original team was an all-star cast including John Battelle, author of The Search and now head of blog advertising network Federated Media and Nicholas Negroponte, now head of the hundred dollar laptop project. The magazine was acquired by Conde Nast parent company Advanced Publications in 1998. A stock deal took the online component out of its hands the next year.
Well, that makes a lot of sense … I never totally understood the reasoning behind Wired.com and Wired the magazine being separate.
I’ve lost quite a bit of interest in Wired magazine since my first exposure, had no idea they had been separated. I agree with John above - does make sense, and I can’t see anything but positives for Naste, too bad for the slumping tech-writers that are going to be back in the job market.
Its about time they start working together, maybe know both will be of some quality..
Of the original dot com boom publications, only Business 2.0 is coming close to recovering its original ingenuity and quality. I hope that Wired will as well?
I allways though Shift magazine was the best of the bunch. Too bad it dodnt get the readership it deserved.
When was lycos bought by the Koreans? I thought they were owned by terra.com the spanish company (subsidiary of telefonica).
They need to bring the two back together, as wired.com has been lagging as of late, and needs a kick in the pants. They’re sitting on prime web real estate there.