MSNBC.com Acquires Newsvine

Posted on October 8, 2007

MSNBC has acquired Newsvine, a popular social news website. The acquisition is MSNBC.com's very first in its short 11-year history. Details about the acquisition can be found here in an article on MSNBC. The companies are not disclosing the purchase price.

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, but otherwise, Newsvine will continue to operate independently, Tillinghast said.
Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com's newsroom, "is just a great fit."
"Newsvine is local, small, nimble - they don't come with a lot of things you don't want," he said, such as complicated partnerships and contracts. "There isn't a lot to rearrange."

Those are the positives above. This post on Loose Wire discusses some of the negative things that can happen when old media acquires a web community. Read/Write Web says MSNBC.com will be getting the following with Newsvine as far as the traffic and size of the community go.

What is MSNBC getting, other than a slick and feature-packed website? Newsvine is also a thriving Citizen Journalism community, with solid stats. In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.

Paid Content is guessing the price was in the $5-$7 million range.