Rana Foroohar reports in the Newsweek International, “The scramble to entertain you has unleashed the second coming of dot-coms”.


Rana Foroohar reports in Newsweek International that increasing media buying of internet websites indicates a second boom for the dot com companies. She says, “This time the business plans are written on legal paper (not napkins), the prospects are measured in dollars (not hits) and the focus is on media companies (not Anything.com)”.

She refers to the following acquisitions:

Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of three major dot-coms: Scout.com, Intermix Media, which owns MySpace.com and IGN.com for $1.2 billion.
Dow Jones’s acquisition of MarketWatch.com for $519 million.
The New York Times’s purchase of About.com for $410 million.

The reasons she gives for the growth are:
The United States, Europe and Asia now has access to broadband connections.
Online ads are at $14.7 billion per year in the U.S. and are growing 23 percent per year.
“Web users are as important as the old media gatekeepers in the production of online information and entertainment, and they are pushing the market where they want it to go”.

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