What is the fascination that internet billionaires have with print media? First Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post, then Marc Benioff snaps up Time magazine. And now Barry Diller is in “advanced talks” to buy Meredith Corp., the company behind People, Better Homes and Gardens, Entertainment Weekly, among others, according to the Wall Street Journal. And as was the case with both Time and The Washington Post, the price Diller is reportedly negotiating to pay reflects an astonishing decline in value for Meredith.
Think of this: Meredith paid $3.2 billion three and a half years ago to buy Time Inc. and yet if the Journal is correct, Diller is negotiating to pay $2.5 billion for all of Meredith, including the titles it owned before it bought the publisher. Even taking into account the half a billion dollars that Meredith raised in quick sales of titles such as Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, the reported price implies close to 38% of the combined value of Meredith’s magazine and digital properties (or $1.5 billion) has evaporated since 2018, according to my back-of-the-envelope math.
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