Paid Content gets Acquired by Guardian Media Group for $30 million

Bilal Hameed | 474 Views

Kara Swisher over at Boom Town has the scoop that Paid Content has been acquired by Guardian Media Group for a price "north of $30 million". The rumor didn’t go through its circles in the blogosphere and was immediately confirmed by Rafat Ali.

According to Rafat:

We got scooped on the biggest story of our own company’s life. Such is our life. Almost six years after our company started with paidContent.org, we have been acquired by Guardian News & Media (GNM), the news media division of UK-headquartered Guardian Media Group (GMG). Guardian itself is owned by the Scott Trust.

Paid Content is owned by Content Next, which also runs MocoNews that covers Mobile News and ContentSutra that exclusively covers business sector news in India. Paid Content in turn focused on covering the financial aspects of the business economy. The blog was started in 2002 by Rafat Ali. Ali later raised an undisclosed amount of capital in 2006 to scale his efforts, at which time it expected to bring in $1 million in ad revenue for the year.

Earlier this year we have witnessed the acquisition of Ars Technica, a much bigger but technology focused blog to Conde Nast for a reported $25 million. Prior to all this, we have seen the acquisition of Weblogs Inc, a network of blogs founded by Jason Calacanis for $20 - $35 million. But Weblogs Inc was sold back in 2005, when a few people knew about the power of this medium of publishing. So Paid Content’s acquisition put its price tag to be the highest among the successful exits of Blog Networks to this date.

We wish Rafat and his team all the luck and are really happy for them. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a really detailed run down of the entire deal, so do check it out.

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