CBS Buys 10-Month Old Celebrity Gossip Blog Dotspotter; Price Around $10 Million
By Rafat Ali - Wed 10 Oct 2007 07:34 PM PST
CBS (NYSE: CBS) has bought 10-month-old celebrity gossip blog Dotspotter, for a price of around $10 million. The rumor was first reported on Valleywag, and has also been confirmed to us by sources.
The site, based in San Francisco, was co-founded by CEO Anthony Soohoo, who is a former VP from Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). Also read this background post from B2.0 on Dotspotter.
The price seems pretty high for a sector which is saturated with more high profile celebrity blogs/sites like TMZ.com, PerezHilton, and others...and, of course, the fact that the site was only launched mid-January this year. But one source close to the situation told us the price is not for the site itself, but the team that has built it...that may also mean there’s a heavy earn-out component, possibly. Would be interesting to see if the site lasts as a standalone brand.
CBS launched a celebrity news site Showbuzz in June last year, but hasn’t really burned the charts. This might be one way of trying to do that. CBS also produces two celebrity tabloid shows The Insider and ET.
Update: The seed investment is less than a million, and as Valleywag pointed out, Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is one of the investors, along with couple of other angels.
Posted in: Companies, CBS, Social Media, Nanopublishing, VC+M&A
