Discovery Channel Acquiring HowStuffWorks.com For $250 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Oct 15, 2007

Discovery Communications announced today that they will acquire HowStuffWorks.com for $250 million. HowStuffWorks receives roughly 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month. HowStuffWorks also has 11 million users globally.

“We’re way behind in new media and digital,” said David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications. “I don’t think we win just by building vertically.”

HowStuffWorks is known to be a website for answering through-provoking questions such as How Roller Coasters Work, How Submarines Work, How Your Brain Works, etc.

And HowStuffWorks claims that the acquisition by Discovery Communications for HowStuffWorks is a giant experiment to test whether its possible to combine the best things about TV and about the Web to create something that is a sum greater than its parts.

HowStuffWorks’ text content will be embedded into Discovery Channel’s 100,000 hours of documentaries and video footage. Discovery Communications has over 100 networks that reach 1.5 billion viewers across the world interested in learning more about science. There is a sample of media integration between Discovery and HowStuffWorks on the page about How Shark Attacks Work.

HowStuffWorks was founded by Marshall Brain, a professor at North Carolina State University in 1998. The Convex Group acquired HowStuffWorks in 2002. The Convex Group is an investment company founded buy Jeff Arnold, former CEO of WebMD. Carl Icahn also owns a stake in HowStuffWorks. Carl Icahn is in the top 100 world’s richest people, net worthed at $8.7 billion, generated by his own hedge fund and ownership in various companies.

Source: WSJ