Revision as of 22:54, 12 April 2023 by 38.154.164.75 (talk) (Created page with "Picking up some news as an afterthought remains a familiar practice even in the digital age, whether it's grabbing a fresh York Times together with your Starbucks or perhaps a...")(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Picking up some news as an afterthought remains a familiar practice even in the digital age, whether it's grabbing a fresh York Times together with your Starbucks or perhaps a USA Today while waiting to board an airplane.For an organization with deep pockets, CNN could become the next very good news impulse buy.Rupert Murdoch has made a bold, $75 billion bid for Time Warner. While the purchase is definately not a certainty, one of the many possible unwanted effects of this type of deal will be CNN going up on the market, to avoid antitrust problems because of conflicts with Fox News. CNN's sale, if it just happened, could fetch an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion, an unnamed person familiar with the problem told Bloomberg. (1)Speculation abounds regarding which company would want to grab CNN, if the cable network become available. Popular guesses include CBS, Disney and Yahoo. Google, while less likely, has also been mentioned as a contender; Porter Bibb, managing partner at Mediatech Capital Partners, pointed out that the network could be a perfect complement to Google-owned YouTube. (2)This speculation got me thinking: What about Facebook?Facebook announced earlier this season that it would acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion. That price was around 3 x the estimated value of CNN, for a company that had, at most, $300 million in revenues at that time the deal was announced. I've no opinion about the WhatsApp deal, mostly because I've almost no idea what WhatsApp does. (Within my age, this ignorance is permitted, though not encouraged. Because of Google I am aware, vaguely, that WhatsApp lets users send messages and share information, which I thought I had been doing.) I do know, however, that CNN has real viewers and makes real, though not vast, profits.I spend a big portion of every day gathering information. I troll various news sites to find out about things that are essential to me. I also check Facebook to discover more regarding people who are important to me. Because those people often share and comment upon news items, and because I sometimes react to the items they share, Facebook undoubtedly already has some idea which topics are important to me. If Facebook wanted to save me the difficulty of scanning six news sites each day, I'd be happy to tell them more.It has long been a given that Facebook really wants to know as much as possible about what its users do on multilple web sites. And of course Facebook really wants to maximize the quantity of time its users devote to Facebook itself. Why wouldn't Facebook want to get in to the business of providing me with news that I, in turn, might tell my friends? It could mean my friends and I would all spend more time on the social networking, which is just what Facebook and its own advertisers ultimately want.Facebook also has a brief history of acquisitions, not absolutely all which were intuitive from the exterior. In an inferior deal than its WhatsApp purchase, the business acquired virtual reality start-up Oculus VR earlier this year. Bystanders have guessed that the acquisition was everything from a vanity purchase by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a long-term try to develop a Google Glass competitor. In any event, Facebook has demonstrated that it's willing to reach outside its existing model. Comparatively, a news organization would not be much of a stretch.Zuckerberg is a bright guy who has some cash at his disposal. He doesn't need me to inform him how to spend it. If he can snag CNN for, say, $7 billion, it will be roughly the equivalent of me picking up People magazine at the checkout counter. (In my case, just a copy of the most recent issue, not the actual publication itself.) If CNN catches Zuckerberg's eye, there is no doubt he'll know what to do with it.So it wouldn't shock me if Facebook experienced the news business. It would seem to be one of the most logical ways for the social network to go about filling its users' news feeds.Sources:1) Bloomberg, "Fox's Carey Dropped Bomb promptly Warner's Bewkes Over Lunch"2) Bloomberg, "CNN Said Valued at Around $8 Billion by Fox in Time Warner Deal"For more articles, please visit the Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC newsletter or subscribe to the blog.