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August 1, 2007

Discovery Acquires TreeHugger.com For $10million

Duncan Riley

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treehugger.jpgDiscovery Communications has announced the acquisition of TreeHugger.com for what is believed to be $10 million.

TreeHugger.com started as an environmentally focused blog in 2004 and grew to include forums, green guides and other related features. The site sits in the Top 20 blogs worldwide according to Technorati and is said to have 1.4 million unique visitors a month. Alexa ranks the site at 5,395.

TreeHugger.com’s Graham Hill said in a post that the acquisition “will allow TreeHugger to go much further and faster than it would have been able to alone or with another partner… by teaming up with Discovery, we believe we can more effectively play a critical role in [our environmental] mission”

TreeHugger.com will become part of Discovery’s Planet Green initiative.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Rajesh Anandakrishnan

    August 1st, 2007 at 12:52 pm

    Wow - its amazing to see big companies aquiring blogs. Treehugger is a good blog & it deserves it.

  2. walkable

    August 1st, 2007 at 12:57 pm

    My inspiration.

  3. Detroit

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:00 pm

    Jeez!

  4. pista

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    Wow - its cool. Treehugger rocks.

    Mails I Read
    http://www.mailsiread.com

  5. Dominic

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    In my view, the best on the internet. I’m happy for the sellers and do hope it does not change.

  6. Saagar

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    Thats a good move by Discovery, instead of starting afresh and trying to market one, what better way to get something which is already famous. Now, news like these are a lot more interesting than Facebook being banned by some company at work. Good to see some nice news Duncan :)

  7. biz.inc

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    cool, indeed. nice payout

  8. Frank Sinton

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    Treehugger and TreehuggerTV have some great content. They have been a part of our site for 15 months now and i’ve watched a lot of what they have been producing. This is a smart move.

    Expect to see a lot more bloggers and videobloggers being acquired over the next year or so as traditional media companies ascend into the blogosphere and vlogosphere.

    It is being driven by the audience - newspapers and TV are losing viewership in the 18-34 year old demographic and blogs and vlogs are increasing audiences in this demographic.

    -Frank
    CEO, Mefeedia.com

  9. Alaska Miller

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    @Frank Sinton

    That’s some nice tailcoating right there!

  10. Duff

    August 1st, 2007 at 1:59 pm

    This is great inspiration for conscious media startups.

  11. smith288

    August 1st, 2007 at 2:11 pm

    So I guess they won’t be in the market for ForestPurge.com or KillTheTrees.com?

  12. ShopPremier

    August 1st, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    TreeHugger is a great site. Congratulations to the team over there and im sure a lot of us are looking forward for everything to come. Maybe the news of this will show to the general public that going green can be profitable!

  13. Greg

    August 1st, 2007 at 2:26 pm

    Neat! I like TreeHugger, and I like DCI, so this is a win-win, I guess?

  14. David Mackey

    August 1st, 2007 at 2:58 pm

    Congrats for TreeHugger - though I think $20 mil. would have been better. :-)

  15. jarowh

    August 1st, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    Congrats. Discover is great. Treehugger is great. Good purchase. Good thinking.

  16. elvirs

    August 1st, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    ok now lets face it.
    both discovery says it delivers the nature to people over tv to i donno make them more environment aware and treehugger is there to inform people about environmental issues, news and other stuff.
    now, if discovery had spent this 10 mln dollars on planting trees or cleaning waste water they would have made huge contribution to make the earth a greener place.
    now i am feeling like this all stuff, like going green and everything is just a new business, new money. thats all.

  17. Steve Elbows

    August 1st, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    Well elvirs, I know what you mean. There will be a lot of different sorts of green business, lots of different motives, and some of it will just be about money. To some it will be a fad or fashion, the latest style of marketing. Some will think they are being green and helping but will actually be doing more harm overall than if they didnt exist. Some will do a lot of good and have just a few downsides. Some will be genuinely sustainable & green, eventually. Many services that may not be marketed as green may actually be doing some good. eg downloading music isntead of buying it on CDs, uses less oil I would guess.

    I dont think Discovery would have done more good spending the 10 million on a specific physical green activity. Humans in general are responsible for these issues, and so education and changing behavior is a very important part of the green revolution, and as discovery are a media entity I think they should so the stuff they know best, and so buying something like Treehugger makes sense.

    Theres going to be a lot of mone in green stuff, and its going to be overexposed and quite a lot of people will end up cynical about it in one way or another, especially if the general greening of corporate marketing continues at the current pace.

    The funny thing is that ultimately, humans arent going to be able to buy themselves out of these environmental or energy problems. Whilst some of the reduction will be done in cool ways that involve new habits, internet groovyness instead of travelling, and other things that people can get all positive about and others can profit from, at some point there will probably need to be a reduction in consumption and what does that mean for an economy whose god is growth?

    Soylent green is people ;)

  18. Dr O

    August 1st, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    If Treehugger gets only 1.4 million unique visitors a month, and, lets say, Gizmodo 20 times more, does it mean that Gizmodo’s market value is ~200 mln? I don’t thinks so. Looks like Treehugger folks made some good money on a complete hype.

  19. Garth

    August 1st, 2007 at 6:40 pm

    Looks like they have quite few more visitors than techcrunch

    http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv

    (Those keywords on the side are hilarious.)

    Dr O, it is not about the amount of traffic, but the quality, share and the brand. Nerds and geeks provide a lot of traffic to various sites which have very low advertising rates. This is a site with a mainstream audience, share in the green space, and a good brand (which is also a keyword).

  20. Adam

    August 1st, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    @Dr O you have to also look at the uniqueness of the site. Gizmodo has many competitors in the area of Tech, so $200 million might be a little much. But with some of the deals i see going off everyday i wouldn’t be surprised if $100 million wouldnt be out of reach. Treehugger has a very focused and active following, being green takes effort. Sitting at home with your Blu Ray player watching 300 on the 52″ 1080p LCD does not. Even though I am not knocking doing that. Treehugger readers are most likely Discoveries main audience and to be able to purchase 1.4 million viewers a month is a great (even though i hate the word because it reminds me of Bernie Ebbers) “synergy”.

  21. Jason

    August 1st, 2007 at 6:53 pm

    TreeHugger.com has a Quantcast tracker on their site, so you can see that their exact traffic is 1.78 mil uniques/month: http://quantcast.com/treehugger.com. Saying that Gizmodo gets 20 times more uniques is ridiculous.

  22. Dr O

    August 1st, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    Adam:

    At least on Gizmodo, the companies can advertise Blu Ray and LCDs, on Trehugger they currently advertise reusable shopping bags.

  23. syawal

    August 1st, 2007 at 9:02 pm

    congrat to treehugger.com, It was my best green site.

  24. Socialpyramid

    August 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 am

    Wow, I couldn’t agree with Steve Elbows more. Well said! Every social movement works on a full spectrum of types of people and actions. Generally, to be successful you need many, many approaches. You need to reach as many people as possible, but everyone will contribute (or oppose) in slightly different ways. You need green media as well as protestors, the hard core crowd as well as the very green lite crowd.

    You’re going to see big business and tiny nonprofits in the green sphere for many years to come. Hopefully, the overall inertia will be in a positive direction. Treehugger and Discovery are doing their parts, and everyone else needs to do theirs.

    It’s easy to say: just give the money to direct charity. But human and natural socieities are so much more complicated. That’s like telling the Red Cross not to hold expensive fundraising galas: they do it because spending money on such things makes them more money down the line. Things are subtle.

  25. Jeremy

    August 2nd, 2007 at 10:00 am

    Good for treehugger, and it makes Discovery that much better of a company in my eyes. Corporations can’t be too environmentally friendly.

  26. Greenie

    August 3rd, 2007 at 5:56 am

    This is my fav green site http://www.care2.com

  27. tom

    August 8th, 2007 at 7:14 pm

    felicidades por la venta y a seguir creciendo

  28. cpl

    August 9th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    http://www.roamoo.com/ is my latest favorite site

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