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Media - Monday, October 15, 2007

Game Ball Goes To HowStuffWorks.com. Sold To Discovery For $250M

Discovery is buying the Web site HowStuffWorks for a quarter of a billion dollars. We respect how Discovery's CEO explained the deal: "We're way behind in new media and digital. I don't think we win just by building vertically."

Discovery says it plans to combine HowStuffWorks's text content with Discovery's 100K+ hours of video footage. Plus it looks like HowStuffWorks will get its own TV show. It already has a series of popular books so why not.

HowStuffWorks is a lesson in starting early. The startup was founded in 1998 by Marshall Brain, a professor at North Carolina State University. HowStuffWorks' success coat-tails Wikipidia as both sites come up high on Google searches for thousands of topics.

In March 2002, HowStuffWorks was sold to the Convex Group, an Atlanta-based investment vehicle run by Jeff Arnold, founder and former CEO of WebMD. The WSJ also reports that Carl Icahn owns a large stake.

Read - WSJ