UPDATED 21:54 EDT / DECEMBER 20 2015

NEWS

Vagina articles sell: report claims Mashable is on the market for $300-$350m

Media firm Mashable, Inc. may be on the market with a report Friday that the company is actively shopping itself to potential buyers.

According to sources quoted by Ken Doctor at Politico Mashable has employed Deutsche Bank to find a potential suitor and is chasing an acquisition sum around the $300 to $350 million mark.

The same report claims that Time Warner, Inc. took an interest in acquiring the site but may have since lost interest; of note Time Warner already holds a minority shareholding in the company through Mashable’s $25 million Series B round in January this year.

Mashable for its part is neither denying or confirming the report, saying only that it “does not comment on investment or financial matters related to the company,” while Chief Executive Officer Pete Cashmore is said to be not returning emails or calls.

This isn’t the first time a report of Mashable being acquired has emerged, with the site allegedly coming close to being acquired by CNN (itself a Time Warner subsidiary via Turner Broadcasting Systems) in 2012 for a then rumored $200 million, and before that by AOL, Inc. in 2010.

Vagina articles sell

Founded in 2005 by Cashmore in his bedroom, Mashable in its early years was a tech site of some repute before the site shifted to a content model that included a wide range of articles covering anything and everything, with a particular obsession with vaginas.

In only the last few months Mashable has posted multiple vagina related articles ranging from “Feminist blogger boldly makes bread with yeast from her own vagina,” “Woman accidentally buys dress covered in giant vaginas,” and “Woman sensibly hides loaded gun in her vagina,” and that’s only a taste of the 1,280 vagina related articles found via a quick Google search.

The concept of pointing out vagina related articles in the age of whorish clickbait across many different types of media properties may be somewhat glib but if you talk to many people who were strong fans of Mashable from its early days nearly all of them without fail will tell you they no longer read the site due to its push down market to drive traffic.

That said if it has worked for them who are we to judge whether an obsession with vagina articles is a good thing or not?

If the buy happens it will top off a busy year in the online media space including Verizon’s acquisition of AOL for $4.4 billion May, Axel Springer’s acquisition of 88 percent of Business Insider on a $442 million valuation in September, and Comcast’s (via NBCU) investment in both Buzzfeed and Vox Media in August.

Mashable itself has raised $31 million to date from investors including Tribune Digital, Time Arner Investments, Elio Leoni-Sceti, Kass Lazerow, Michael Lazerow, Social Starts, New Markets Venture Partners and Updata Partners.

Image credit: tedmurphy/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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