Internet.com Acquires Earthweb’s content

Today, Earth­web and Internet.com announced that Internet.com was acquir­ing all of Earthweb’s con­tent prop­er­ties. For me, it’s an inter­est­ing announce­ment because I was involved in the build­ing of both properties.

When I left Internet.com in 1996 and went to Earth­web, I was in charge of build­ing Earthweb’s prop­er­ties into some­thing com­pet­i­tive with Internet.com. At the time, there were already a few play­ers in the news mar­ket and I decided that Earthweb’s best posi­tion­ing was to stay focused on the devel­oper com­mu­nity instead of try­ing to do just Inter­net related stuff. Many peo­ple (includ­ing a lot of peo­ple on this list) have asked me what I thought of this announce­ment. So here it is.

Two roads converge

In a way, today’s announce­ment was one that didn’t sur­prise me much. Over the years, I’ve stayed in touch with peo­ple at both com­pa­nies and, as time went on, I came to real­ize that both prop­er­ties should be inte­grated. Before Earthweb’s IPO, such dis­cus­sions were held both at Earth­web and at Internet.com and there seems to seem some dif­fer­ing views on the sub­ject. How­ever, I had always been nagged by the feel­ing that the two prop­er­ties (the developer.com net­work and the internet.com net­work) would be a per­fect fit.

With today’s announce­ment, I think that both com­pa­nies ben­e­fit. For starters, Internet.com has clearly estab­lished itself as a leader in offer­ing con­tent to the inter­net com­mu­nity. With this acqui­si­tion, Internet.com solid­i­fies its reach to the devel­oper com­mu­nity. That’s a great thing for Internet.com and I think that those prop­er­ties will fit very well within the net­work and that Internet.com will lever­age its exist­ing prop­er­ties to max­i­mize return on the assets they have acquired. As a result, I’d like to con­grat­u­late Alan Meck­ler and a very smart move.

On the Earth­web side, I am happy to hear that the com­pany is focus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar area in which it has estab­lished a strong lead­er­ship. The acqui­si­tion of Dice.com allowed Earth­web to get into the job place­ment mar­ket and estab­lish one of the pre­em­i­nent IT-related job boards on the mar­ket. This could posi­tion the com­pany for a pos­si­ble acqui­si­tion by a monster.com or hotjobs.com in that it is now more aligned with their busi­ness. If run suc­cess­fully, the new Earth­web could be a very nice acqui­si­tion play.

Notable though, was that ITKnowl­edge, the fee-based ser­vice that Earth­web devel­oped was not part of this acqui­si­tion. Jack Hidary has said that the com­pany will be get­ting out of that busi­ness and I believe that he’s seek­ing a buyer for this ser­vice. The bot­tom line, though, is that Earth­web will man­age to lower its costs as it will get rid of some of the over­head required to build new con­tent. While it has built some strong prop­er­ties, the com­pany was too much of a niche player to suc­cess­fully run the con­tent unit to prof­itabil­ity. As a result, it’s a smart move on their part to get out of that business.

The most fas­ci­nat­ing thing is that Earth­web is no longer the com­pany that went pub­lic in that, apart from some of founders, noth­ing is left in terms of the model and assets the com­pany went on.

All and all, this is a great win for Internet.com, as it secures its pre­em­i­nent posi­tion in the con­tent arena and allows it to expand into new mar­kets. I am not, how­ever, famil­iar enough with the job board busi­ness model to com­ment on Earthweb’s future poten­tial but I am glad to see that the company’s man­age­ment has made some very tough deci­sions and is work­ing on focus­ing in a par­tic­u­lar arena.