I haven't read Barron's in years, but SeekingAlpha has this neat feature which provides annotated summaries of Barron's articles. One of summaries was Why CNET, TheStreet.com, WebMD, PlanetOut, The Knot and Answers.com Won't Be Acquired.
Tech Trader author Eric Savitz wonders: Why are we not seen any takeouts of internet content providers? His thesis: Buyers want user-generated content, not paid-content creators. Internet giants will gladly pay a premium to invest in tools that help users create content for fellow users (a-la MySpace, Photobucket, YouTube [all already gone] and FaceBook). Deep-rooted social networks keep users coming back to hear what their friends have to say -- and to socialize -- with a stickiness factor paid-content sites can't reproduce.
This is a pretty silly thesis. There have been plenty of deals for producers of paid content, at all ends of the size spectrum and there will be plenty more.
- D&B recently bought First Research for $22+ million
- Dow Jones recently bought Financial News for $50+ million
- Pearson recently bought mergermarket for $190+ million
- Informa is buying Datamonitor for $990+ million
- Thomson is buying Reuters
- News Corp is bidding for Dow Jones
Admittedly, I only read the summary of the article, but there's plenty of M&A activity in the paid content arena. And there's a lots of venture capital activity as well. To believe that user-generated content is the end-all be-all in content space is absurd.
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