After more than four years, marketing company Red Ventures has squeezed as much juice as it can out of famed technology publication CNET.
On Tuesday, the South Carolina-based company affirmed it sold CNET to Ziff-Davis for a little more than $100 million, or $400 million less than the amount it paid to acquire the publication and a handful of others from Paramount Global (then ViacomCBS) in 2020. The New York Times was the first to report on the deal.
Coincidentally, Ziff-Davis and CNET shared common ownership when CNET Networks agreed to acquire Ziff-Davis and its online publication ZDNet for $1.6 billion more than two decades ago.
Once a respectable publication that covered the intersection of technology and business with a curious eye, CNET experienced numerous setbacks at Red Ventures, which acquired it as part of an overall strategy to buy legacy digital brands and convert them into affiliate platforms in order to drive higher sales for its partners, through which the company receives sizable commissions.
Before the deal between Red Ventures and Paramount closed, the companies agreed to an arrangement by which CNET Media Group — which operated CNET and a handful of other websites — would lay off around 100 employees, sources told The Desk. The pink slips impacted around 10 percent of CNET Media Group’s staff at the time.
Last year, CNET found itself embroiled in a scandal over the use of artificial intelligence tools that plagiarized content found on other websites, as first revealed by Futurism, which also found several personal finance articles on CNET’s website that contained factual errors.
Earlier this year, editors at Wikipedia debated whether CNET could be considered a “reliable source” for the website’s fact-based entries. At least one editor cited the plagiarism scandal as one reason why CNET should no longer be trusted.
“Red Ventures has not been remotely transparent about any of this — the company could at best be described as deceitful,” one Wikipedia editor wrote during the debate. “The company runs a big stable of SEO-focused content mills across its ecosystem, just like what we’re seeing on post-acquisition CNET.”
Around the same time, The Verge published a lengthy expose that showed Red Ventures executives and managers had pressured writers at CNET and other properties to produce content in a less-critical tone in order to appease certain advertisers. The allegations were made by unnamed sources that The Verge described as former Red Ventures employees.
