There are many reasons why one entity might want to buy a website. Mostly it’s for financial reasons–as with everything. For a company that’s as big as CBS, you’d have to put it blatantly of pure monopoly, but you can still ask why the media giant chooses to buy out small web properties. CBS’ portfolio is actually quite impressive. Apart from the television channels and film companies that bear the company name, CBS also owns The CW, Showtime, The Smithsonian Channel, Simon & Schuster, Watch!, Ecomedia, Pop, and Ten Australia. With a portfolio as such, why is CBS targeting websites like comicbook.com?
According to sources, CBS Interactive–the company’s online content network–took ownership of a number of various comic book related domains. More particularly, these domains were previous properties of comicbook.com, one of the largest websites that talks about anything and everything related to comic books on television. As it still shows on the website, comicbook.com was owned by ComicBook, LLC d/b/a Pop Culture Media. They describe their company as an “entertainment media company for a generation that loves larger-than-life characters, celebrities and entertainment franchises.” There are also links from the comicbook.com site that leads to popculture.com, which talks more about current celebrity news.
Looking deeper into Pop Culture Media, it comes to no surprise that CBS would even be interested in buying the company at all. According to the site, the company reaches more than 28 million unique visitors monthly. That’s just on their website. Their social media channels have at total of 27 million followers. That’s an impressive number for a company that has two main websites. It helps that the subject matter of their websites are mainstream and relevant. There’s a lot of nerd culture going around these days, with previously geeky shows such as Star Wars and Star Trek being mainstream today. There are also tons of content on superheroes and other sci-fi subjects and shows that fans can get through their websites. Let’s not even get started on popculture.com’s pull on celebrity news. The Kardashians alone probably pull in millions of visitors to their popculture.com site monthly.
The buy makes sense for CBS, especially since one of their channels, The CW, has become the go to channel when it comes to comic book shows. The CW was where the Arrowverse started. It started with the show Arrow followed by The Flash. Arrowverse now also includes Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow.
As far as what CBS plans to do with comicbook.com, we’re not entirely sure. This isn’t the first time CBS acquired a comic book related website only to sell it again later on. There was Newsarama back in 2007, CBR in 2016, and Comic Beats just last year. CBS also just recently acquired Comic Vine and still holds the rights to the property. It could all just be for profit, we’re not entirely sure. But it’s not like it was such as bad deal for comicbook.com. We don’t have the numbers on that sale, but we’re pretty sure they got a decent paycheck.
