News Corp acquires IGN for US$650 million

Friday, September 9, 2005

US-based News Corporation (formerly based in Australia) has announced its purchase of IGN Entertainment, a US-based online media group, for US$650 million. IGN's assets include popular video game sites IGN.com and GameSpy.com, as well as movie and game review site Rotten Tomatoes. IGN will become part of the News Corporation's Fox Interactive Media division, which will expand the company's online presence to become the fourth largest online media company, with over 70 million individual users and 12 billion page views per month when the takeover is complete.

This deal is the third purchase of an online media company by News Corp since July. The current deals followed the previous purchases of Intermix Media and Scout Media. Over $1.5 billion has been spent by the company in acquiring online media this year, with another $500 million still to be spent under the current budget.

News Corp has been criticized for spending too much to bring IGN into the fold, including paying off the latter's US$50 million debt, since IGN has never been very profitable. However, IGN revenue has sharply increased over the past year, and it may be a profitable addition once integrated with News Corp's other online holdings.

Sources

"News Corp's IGN buy given a tick" — The Age, September 09, 2005 (free registration required)

J. Kyle Foster. "News Corp. to Purchase IGN Entertainment for $650 Mln" — Bloomberg, September 08, 2005

Financial Times. "News Corp buys internet publisher for $650m" — MSN, September 08, 2005

Share this:

The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication.
Please note that this only applies to Wikinews content created prior to September 25, 2005. All content created after that date is released under a Creative Commons license which is mentioned at the bottom of each article. This is currently the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.