Discovery Communications, which owns the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, hopes to turnaround its failed efforts to get a foothold on the Internet by buying the popular website HowStuffWorks.com for $250 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Discovery will use this popular base to make its library of videos more easily available to the public.
HowStuffWorks.com, a privately held company whose best known owner is investor Carl Icahn, was founded by Marshall Brain in 1998. Brain is a university professor in North Carolina. He built the audience for the site by analyzing what people were searching for on the Internet and creating content to answer those queries.
In addition to HowStuffWorks.com, the purchase will include several other digital properties including a map database, which are not yet profitable. Discovery hopes that by controlling a website that already gets 3.8 million unique U.S. users each month it will have more success drawing Internet users to its online content. Chief Executive David Zaslav, who has been redesigning Discovery in his own image since taking over in January, told the Journal he believes this acquisition will give Discovery the "online firepower" it's been lacking.
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