Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

BusinessWeek sold for a pittance

The print side of BusinessWeek magazine was sold for scrap. It's the content Bloomberg bought.

BusinessWeek, one of the premier business magazines in North America, was sold today for between $2-million and $5-million (U.S.). McGraw-Hill unloaded the magazine, with it's 912,000 subscribers, to Bloomberg after searching for a buyer since July. A major slump in advertising revenue was blamed on the magazine's poor performance as of late.

Let's set aside the shocking news that an 80-year-old publication with 400 employees and a paid circ of just under a million sold for so little. I still remember one of the finest editors I've worked with, Dave Wreford, saying BusinessWeek was a must-read.

Instead, let's focus on this paragraph clipped from the Globe and Mail story announcing the news:

The magazine will help Bloomberg add analytical content to its current offerings, which focus on rapid news reporting and giving financial professionals information through roughly 300,000 electronic terminals, Bloomberg president Daniel Doctor off said in a statement yesterday.

That says to me that Bloomberg bought the content, not the business model. Heck, they don't even seem interested in the publication's website. No, Bloomberg isn't buying a business on the cheap, banking on unloading it at a profit once the economy heats up. All they want is the content.

Now consider this. Twitter, a free application with no discernible way to generate revenue, is valued at $1 billion. And that's despite the fact that cracks are starting to appear in the company:

Interestingly, Twitter as a service is starting to stagnate. The user growth, according to the author, has plateaued at around 8 million new users per month. There are a decent percentage, 14%, who don't have any followers, and three quarters of Twitter users have fewer than 10 followers.

I'm not sure what the ramifications are for other media, especially those near and dear to my heart -- those in business-to-business publishing. Just hear this: Content is king, and queen, and knight, and court jester. It's everything.

And the world is changing... fast.