Mike Marquez, CBS Interactive's chief deal maker, gives us the rationale behind his company's $1.8 billion acquisition of CNet.
"There wasn't a lot of overlap, and where there was... it was complementary," says Marquez, who told us in an earlier interview what type of properties he's still looking for, and gave his advice to entrepreneurs.
The tech news pioneer also has some "great URLs," like news.com, that will be easy to promote on CBS TV and radio properties because their names are so easy to remember.
The CNet deal fit their strategy of going after premium content, rather than user-generated content found on social networking sites.
Advertisers want to get their brands next to premium content, and the CNet deal, "gives us scale with premium inventory."
With the purchase, CBS Interactive is now one of the Top 10 Web networks in the U.S., with more than 50 million unique monthly visitors.
the value of the vertical domain names can be as high as 30-50% of the valuation. cant wait to see the cross branding execution. "cross pollination" sounds like a fancy name for "cross breeding". finally a premium keyphrase multichannel vertical agenda. myspace started it and cbs may take over. this is going to be exciting. a strategic keyphrase domain network being marketed by CBS. watch out everybody! theres a new player at the table. maybe they will go after the long tail.....imagine my.search.com, contractor.search.com, local.search.com. "leverage the long tail":). VerticalLocator.com