ViacomCBS to Sell CNET to Red Ventures for $500 Million
The acquisition of the tech site comes after weeks of talks
by Lindsey EllefsonViacomCBS announced Monday that it has sold the tech site CNET to Red Ventures in a $500 million deal.
Mark Larkin, EVP and GM of CNET Media Group, and his senior team will remain with the company to continue their leadership of the CNET Media Group team following the acquisition, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
Red Ventures, founded in 2000, is a digital marketing outfit that also operates more than 100 digital brands with more than 3,000 employees across 10 U.S. cities, the U.K. and Brazil. The acquisition accelerates Red Ventures’ entry into new verticals, including consumer technology and gaming.
Earlier this year, Time Inc. announced a partnership with Red Ventures to launch a new personal finance site called NextAdvisor. In 2019, Red Ventures acquired Healthline Media, which includes Healthline.com, Greatist.com and Medical News Today.
“Red Ventures believes in the power of premium content from trusted brands that help people make better life decisions,” Red Ventures CEO and co-founder Ric Elias said in a statement. “Over the last 25 years CNET Media Group has built a dynamic portfolio of brands with well-earned authority on such topics as consumer tech and gaming that play an increasingly important role in people’s lives.”
Larkin added, “I believe that the combination of Red Ventures customer experience platform and CNET Media Group’s rich content and deep editorial expertise greatly benefits both our audiences and our partners. Red Ventures shares our vision and is committed to realizing the full potential of our portfolio of world-class brands.”
The deal comes after weeks of talks with the media holding company and a few years of expansion for Red Ventures: This year, the company entered into a partnership with Time Inc. to launch a personal finance site, NextAdvisor. In 2019, it acquired Healthline Media, including sites Healthline.com, Greatist.com and Medical News Today (MNT). In 2017, Red Ventures acquired Bankrate, which includes Bankrate.com, The Points Guy, and CreditCards.com.
Monday’s acquisition came at the price expected since reports first surfaced in mid-August.
CNET launched in 1994 and was originally a print magazine before it began producing video content. ViacomCBS bought CNET in June 2008 for $1.8 billion, and Viacom merged CNET with its existing CBS Interactive division.
This game, which is available for PC and Mac, has been one of my favorites for a long time. I just turn on one of the European pop radio streams available in the game, and drive around. I pretty much only do jobs so I'll have a destination -- you could just not do them if you'd rather just wander.
It's like "Euro Truck Simulator," but in places that mostly just have dirt roads that are covered in snow. The other night I spent an hour slowly pulling my truck out of a mud puddle and I loved every second of it.
These games are about rolling up garbage into a giant ball. They're cute, and nice, and upbeat. The most recent of these, "Katamari Damacy Reroll," is a remake of the original game for Switch and PC. If you've got an Xbox 360 or PS3 lying around you can play some of the older games too.
This game, which you can get as a digital download on any recent PlayStation device or on PC, is so chill and therapeutic. You're just a flower petal floating on the wind drifting around with other flower petals. It'll make you feel good.
It's got a novel brand of puzzles, as well as a similar, though less crass, sense of humor to "Saints Row." The story is overall almost nihilistic, and it's got plenty of jokes about giant corporations exploiting people in horrible ways. It feels just about right.
You probably know all about this series a this point, so let this simply serve as a reminder.
This online "Star Wars" game is free for anybody with an ok gaming PC (it came out in 2011, so it's not super demanding), and it's very easy and chill to get into after nearly a decade of quality-of-life improvements. But the real reason you should play it is because it's got the best "Star Wars" stories from the past ten years.
The main stories in these games are overwrought Japanese melodrama, but the real fun is the wacky shenanigans that gangster Kiryu Kazuma gets into in his every day life. That juxtoposition hits the sweet spot. You can get these for PlayStation or PC.
It's another 3D puzzle game in the vein of "Portal," but instead of cracking jokes it's more about musing about the nature of humanity, which has long since gone extinct. That may sound upsetting, but honestly it's pretty calming. It's like going to therapy, but in a puzzle game that's available on every platform, including mobile devices.
It's kinda like Sim City, but I like this one much more just because it's generally less complicated and annoying. Even better: you can get it on PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch, which is unusual for a game like this.
So when you're playing a shooter game, you tend to leave a lot of corpses behind as you move to each new area. But in this game, which is available on Steam for PC and Mac, you're not the one doing the shooting -- you're the one who cleans up all the bodies and mops up and blood. Some people enjoy cleaning their homes to chill, and this is like that but you don't have to stand up.
Nothing really happens in this game. You just wander around pressing buttons and try not to do what the narrator tells you to. It's a weird comedy meta-game of sorts, mocking standard video game storytelling. If you play a lot of video games, it'll amuse you. Available for PC and Mac.
Like all "Final Fantasy" games, the plot here is ludicrous. But the appeal of this game for me has always been as a sort of road trip simulator. You roll around the country with your bros, stopping every once in a while to get gas, kill some monsters, go camping, or climb to the top of a volcano to take down a giant bird so you can take its giant eggs and eat them with cup noodles. It's nice.
This may be the dumbest game ever made. It's not a real "simulator" in the normal sense -- it's actually just a goofy physics game where you like strap a jetpack on your goat or whatever. It's available on pretty much every platform you might use for gaming so you should probably just go for it.
It's just a silly PS4 rhythm game where you perform songs by the famous "vocaloid" Miku and her digital friends. There's plenty of excellent songs, and most of them come with stupidly amusing music videos. And unlike the other Miku games, this one doesn't bother with a plot or any kind of unlock progression. You just have all the 200+ songs from the start and there's nothing to try to force you to do songs you don't like.
I will admit that I've had a pretty tough time laughing at anything the last couple months (have we really been in lockdown that long?), but the ludicrous action comedy game "Saints Row IV" manages to hit the spot even so. Plus it has just enough of a dark tinge to fit this moment in history -- it's pretty much just "The Matrix," except it's aliens running the simulation after they blew up the Earth. Anyway it's funny in the right way for right now. You can grab this on any current game console or PC. For maximum chill, just turn down the difficulty setting and enjoy the madness.
This is your reminder that any app store you have on your phone is absolutely full of free puzzle apps, like word searches or crosswords or whatever. My phone go-to is sudoku, but almost certainly you can get whatever your preferred puzzle time-waster is without having to pay anything.
There are plenty of relaxing video games you can enjoy while there’s nothing to do outside your home
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