Our friends over at Gothamist are probably patting themselves on the back this month, having been purchased after seven years of earnest and relentless city coverage. The buyer is Rainbow Media, a subsidiary of Cablevision that owns the Sundance Channel, IFC, AMC, and others. The purchase price is reported by paidContent to be between $5 and $6 million. It reminds us of when Laurel Touby sold her mediabistro.com, a similar scrappy New York web empire (though that sold for a whopping $23 million in 2007). As happened with Touby, founder Jake Dobkin will have to stay on for a couple of years under the new management. A source reports that the strategic acquisition is designed to help strengthen the “indie-local franchise for Sundance and IFC.” Commenting on Gawker, web mogul Nick Denton (who knows more than a bit about these things) was encouraging about the news, though a bit dark. “Jake and [writer/partner Jen Chung] deserve congratulations for entrepreneurial stamina,” he wrote, doing the math on their compensation after taxes and considering all the years the pair put into the site. “[It] works out as about $150,000 per year — plus any compensation under the employment agreement they get from Cablevision. Not bad — but still better to be even a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs or a fancy Moveable [sic] Type consultant. And you don’t have to work for the Dolans.”
Local Blog Network Gothamist Being Bought by Cablevision’s Rainbow Media [paidContent]
