CBS Pays $10 Million for Dotspotter

Posted on October 11, 2007

GigaOm reports that CBS has bought a relatively unknown celebrity blog called Dotspotter for about $10 million. That's right. $10 million! For Dotspotter! The rumor was first reported on Valleywag. The site was co-founded by CEO Anthony Soohoo, a former Yahoo VP.

Dotspotter doesn't appear to have the traffic to justify the $10 million purchase price - about 300,000 montly pageviews according to a post on Frost Fire Buzz, which cites stats from Complete.com - that's $35 per pair of eyeballs. They also don't appear to have the inbound links to justify the $10 million acquisition - they have just over 330 inbound links according to Technorati but some of those have occurred over the last couple days after news about this acquisition broke.

Other blogs and bloggers are also questioning what CBS paid for this site including Mathew Ingram. The Last Podcast defends the site and says it has rapidly growing traffic. Bloggers are also reminding everyone that CBS also recently bought Wallstrip and last.fm. If you own a blog, vlog or social network selling it to CBS looks like a profitable endeavor - at least while they are trying to figure out what sticks.

To be fair Dotspotter does have a few extra features that make it more than just a regular celebrity gossip blog such as the celebrity ranker and celebrity sightings. But it still seems like a high price tag. There are many celebrity blogs out there that currently have amuch bigger following than Dotspotter does.