Dice Holdings, the owner of Dice.com jobs website has agreed to buy Geeknet’s online media business websites which include Slashdot, Sourceforge and Freecode. The company paid almost $20 million in cash for completing the deal. Scot Melland, Chairman, President and CEO of Dice Holdings Inc said “The SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis and significantly extends our company’s reach into the global tech community.” The press release on Dice Holding’s website adds that in 2011, the online media properties generated $20 million in Revenues. Ken Langone, Chairman of Geeknet on the other hand announced that their company will now focusing its full attention on growing ThinkGeek.
Slashdot, a very popular user generated news site has been the hub of activity with more than 5,300 comments daily and 3.7 million unique visitors each month. SourceForge on the other hand has been a leading open source code publishing and hosting website with nearly 40 million unique visitors. Freecode.com, the third website which is an index of Linux, Unix and cross platform software has been getting 500, 000 unique visitors per month. These websites are collectively expected to give a push to Dice’s other job portals like eFinancialCareers, ClearanceJobs, Rigzone, AllHealthcareJobs, and Targeted Job Fairs,which will eventually be connected to these content generation websites. This will in all possibility drive more traffic to its existing websites.
Michael Durney, SVP, finance and CFO of Dice Holdings, in an interview to TechCrunch, said that the website will be given complete editorial independence and they aim to make it a part of an overall tech and engineering experience at the company. He also said that they expect to learn how these websites engage with their user bases without changing the overall experience of its users.
