Discovery Plans For Purchase Of HowStuffWorks

Oh how wonderful it is when a news story of an acquisition involves an acquirer with an intrinsic interest in the operation it is acquiring. Not like some strange arrangements - of the eBay-Skype variety, for instance.

Delivered by a great many publications today is the story of Discovery’s plans to acquire HowStuffWorks.com for a cool $250 million. The company with a vested interest in bringing educational, informative often scientifically intriguing productions to television viewers in the US and elsewhere, across a number of media channels, is looking to add HowStuffWorks to its operation. Discovery intends to use the site as an outlet for videos the company deems suitable for consumption by a Web audience.

HowStuffWorks currently attracts hordes of people due to its large and growing supply of content centered around mechanics (obviously), making it attractive to Discovery not only for its subject matter (wide-ranging) but the significant amount of traffic it attracts. HowStuffWorks, according to data compiled by ComScore, draws 3.8 million unique visitors every month in the US. The website claims to maintain an average usership of 11 million worldwide. While building an visitor/viewership from scratch might be somewhat easy for Discovery to do, having the ability to work with a well-established base such as the one HowStuffWorks has built since its founding in 1998 is an entry point certainly worth going after in and of itself.

While Discovery intends for HowStuffWorks to retain its core component – its encyclopedic-like text explanations, tutorials, animations, etc. – the company also wishes to infuse the site with “more than 100,000 hours…of video footage,” gleaned from documentaries and other sources of video in its stockpile. Reversely, Discovery will likely include various bits from HowStuffWorks into some of its programming in the future, too.

There’s always a feeling of unease, great or small, surrounding an announcement such as this, but I think it’s safe to say HowStuffWorks will be in good hands from this point on. When a young startup is purchased by a much larger corporation, it’s often seen as good for the little guy. But considering the length of time HowStuffWorks has remained independent, there undoubtedly exists among many fans that unspoken, yearning desire to see that it manages to hold onto its identity while under the auspices of a new parent co.