Newspaper VC Maths : Topix.net
"What have you got ?" rants the editor to his features editor (whose blog has close to the same traffic as the papers :) "How about the maths on the Topix.net deal ?" "Great, thats not one of ours, so lets run it."
From PaidContent : "Topix.net, the news aggregation play got majority bought (75 percent) out by Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Company in March. Mainly related to how much did the three newspaper giants paid for that stake... according to SEC filings from Tribune, it paid $16 million for the 25 percent stake, and according to Gannett's SEC filing, it paid $18 million, and assuming Knight Ridder paid $16 million (lower of the two), the total amount would be $50 million, the higher side of the previously speculated range." (for 75%) SO in March Topix was worth $65M or so. Compared to the MySpace deal at 10X that seems pretty sweet and more strategic. I like their local news/postcode feature (useless though given I'm in Australia) but they need better RSS, contextual content (re findory) and UI sucks. Great asset though and nice shared price. I wonder if all publishers and media companies now need VC arms. (time to clean up the linkedin profile "Has Masters in Venture Capital, can spend money on building RSS website")
From PaidContent : "Topix.net, the news aggregation play got majority bought (75 percent) out by Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Company in March. Mainly related to how much did the three newspaper giants paid for that stake... according to SEC filings from Tribune, it paid $16 million for the 25 percent stake, and according to Gannett's SEC filing, it paid $18 million, and assuming Knight Ridder paid $16 million (lower of the two), the total amount would be $50 million, the higher side of the previously speculated range." (for 75%) SO in March Topix was worth $65M or so. Compared to the MySpace deal at 10X that seems pretty sweet and more strategic. I like their local news/postcode feature (useless though given I'm in Australia) but they need better RSS, contextual content (re findory) and UI sucks. Great asset though and nice shared price. I wonder if all publishers and media companies now need VC arms. (time to clean up the linkedin profile "Has Masters in Venture Capital, can spend money on building RSS website")
posted by redbarren at 4:09 PM
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