Aol In Talks To Buy Mashable [Rumor]
Pete Cashmore founded Mashable from his parent’s basement in 2005 and now it is the top tech blog after surpassing TechCrunch late last year. There is a rumour in the blogosphere that Aol is in talks with Pete Cashmore to buy Mashable out. This was first reported by Gawker media but has also been confirmed by Robert Scoble.
No price tag has been mentioned yet but we would expect it to be upwards of $30 Million since that is the rumored price Aol tried to buy TechCrunch back in 2008.
This doesn’t come as a huge surprise since Mashable has become the ultimate guide for social media news, tips and reviews with over 2.2 million Twitter followers and close to 100,000 Facebook fans. Mashable has also been on the Suggested User List of Twitter since day 1.
Do you think Mashable will be able to sustain their independent and unbiased opinions after being owned by a giant like Aol? Should internet companies like Aol, Google, Microsoft own such blogs at all? How would you feel if Microsoft goes out and buy TechCrunch?
Rishabh Agarwal
January 7th, 2010 at 3:58 am #
No company, be it google or microsoft, should be allowed to buy blogs. Blogs were initially made to raise the voice in an unbiased manner. If these companies start to buy them, they would become another advertising campaigns.
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Omkar Dutta Reply:
January 7th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Agree with @Rishabh
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