Categories: OLD Media Moves

TheStreet.com could benefit from financial media M&A

The Seeking Alpha web site speculates that TheStreet.com could be an acquisition target due to interest in financial media properties in recent months as well as the growing interest in online trading.

It wrote, “News Corp. bids for Dow Jones. Thompson buys Reuters. While TheStreet.com is certainly not in the same class as either of these companies, it does have cachet among retail investors. Consider CNBC as a possible suitor. If it loses the Dow Jones relationship to Fox News, NBC will have to strengthen its ties to TheStreet.com. Who else is there? The only other first tier company is Bloomberg, and it is a rival to CNBC. And there are other possibilities. With an enterprise value of $277M, TheStreet.com is a manageable acquisition for many media companies.

“And what about TheStreet.com’s longtime rival, Marketwatch.com? That was acquired acquired by Dow Jones in 2004 for over $450 million.”

Later, it added, “TheStreet.com’s RealMoney and Minyanville’s Buzz & Banter have more than a dozen well-reasoned trading ideas each day. With Minyanville already snagged by Ameritrade, RealMoney could be a nice fit for E*trade to offer to its E*Trade Pro level customers. This could be either a licensing deal or a takeover.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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View Comments

Andrea Paul says:
August 29, 2007 at 4:19 am
Online brokers are battling for new accounts, but buying companies to provide free content to their clients isn't what they've done so far, and there's no reason to assume they'd do this now or henceforth