Wired Finally Gets Its Website Back

From business2blog:

After years without its own Website, Wired magazine (or, rather, its parent company, Conde Nast) is buying back Wired News for $25 million. Back during the bubble years, Wired had sold the news site to Lycos for $83 million. So it's as if Lycos was borrowing the site for the past seven years and is now returning it like a used car and taking whatever cash it can get for it. (Albeit, it's a nice used car—the folks over at Wired News cover their beat well given their up-till-now limited resources).

Although the site continued to host the magazine's content throughout the years, it wasn't controlled by Wired—which in turn was contractually barred from doing anything else online. The deal will overturn this bizarre and (to Wired editor Chris Anderson) frustrating situation. But you can bet that the real impetus behind the deal is that online advertising is finally becoming a viable source of revenues for major media companies like our competitors over at Conde Nast (as well as us over here at Time Inc.), and the one of the few ad sources that is actually growing.