A business news rollup strategy

Felix Salmon of Reuters argues that someone — he suggests Yahoo — could purchase Forbes, Business Insider, TheStreet.com and SeekingAlpha.com and create a financial news powerhouse.

Salmon writes, “The companies are complementary in many ways. Forbes has a big ad-sales base, as well as a storied brand name, a large events business, and a valuable network of thousands of editorial contributors; it is also furthest along in terms of building a strong native-advertising franchise. Business Insider has growth, attitude, aggression, speed, and by far the most web-native newsroom in financial media. It knows what people want to read, and it is extremely good at providing exactly that. TheStreet, meanwhile, has an enviable list of stock-market investors who are willing to spend serious amounts of money on newsletter subscriptions; it also has a very sophisticated video setup, and last year spent $6 million buying The Deal, which reaches pretty much everybody who matters in the New York financial industry. And Seeking Alpha has managed to build up an extraordinary base of reader-contributors, who between them provide some of the most timely and sophisticated stock-market analysis on the web.

“The big question is, of course: who has $700 million to spend on such a roll-up, as well as the managerial and technological nous to get them all to play nicely together? The facile answer is: anybody who can afford to spend $400 million on Forbes alone can afford to spend $700 million on something which is much more likely to make a real impact. But still, we’re talking about real money here. Which means that one company in particular springs to mind as the place which could put a deal like this together: Yahoo.

“Yahoo already owns Yahoo Finance, which is by far the most valuable financial property on the web. (It’s also, for my money, the single highest-quality product that Yahoo owns.) Yahoo is also in acquire-and-expand mode right now, buying up anything with buzz. $700 million is less than two-thirds what Marissa Mayer paid for Tumblr; she has $1.8 billion in cash alone, and might well come into even more, depending on what happens with Alibaba. On top of that, Yahoo Finance could provide the kind of readership and quality data services that all of the rolled-up companies would kill for: it has the makings of a great platform on which to build a truly formidable financial-media competitor.”

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