What's the value of Willet Blend's Blend Series? That's a wonderful, wonderful thing for Blendtec, where the CEO creates consistently, over the last eight years, videos about what will blend in a blender.
If you haven't seen the one, by the way, the one with Shia LeBeouf, which is what I'm showing you on the screen here, you've got to see it. It''s just really, really great. But what's the value of that series, if we look at its audience, as a series, or as a comedy series or something like that? Or how about if we look at Yiska Bank?
Now Joe, in another module down the road here, is going to be telling you about Yiska Bank in the case study, so I don't want to spoil his thunder here, but Yiska Bank has created an entire 24/7 broadcast media studio to produce news-oriented content around financial education.
So what's the value of that as a TV network? Or finally, what's the value of Indium, and again Joe's going to tell you a little bit about that in another module, but what is the value of Indium, who is, creates industrial soldering equipment, and there from one engineer to another engineer blog series, where they've created just so many more leads, so many more values for their particular company as a blogging network that's now produced in multiple languages. What would that be? What would the value of those be?
So you look at this sort of universe of content, the universe of media properties being produced by different kinds of companies, what's the value?
Well interestingly, we actually happen to know a little bit now, because what's starting to happen is we're starting to see some acquisitions in this space. So you look at somebody like SurfStitch, they acquired two online magazines, The Stab, and Magic Seaweed.
They acquired those companies for $14 million. Those two magazines, they've now created what the CEO calls a content network, with a retail business layered over the top of it.
That's a really interesting evolution, right? Here's an e-commerce company that sells all sorts of fashion for beachwear, that has now acquired two very focused online digital magazines for their subscribers and for the content to create those properties, to create, as he says, a content network with a retail business associated with it. Very, very different.
Now he acquired those for $14 million Australian dollars, I should be clear, and those two magazines get about two million visitors per month combined, or about what Kraft does. Now is Kraft Food and Family magazine property worth $14 million? I don't know, but we're starting to at least start to set some baselines of business value associated with a media property.
Or how about Arrow Electronics, which just this last year, 2015, acquired United Technical Publishing? That's 16 magazines, newsletters, websites, one million subscribers.
Now they're both private companies, so we don't know the amount of the acquisition, but here's a company that provided a meaningful investment in the acquisition of content for a million subscribers across all sorts of different niches in the electronics business.
And the website that you see there is their electronic products website, which actually is very, very focused on those kinds of electronics. So they're looking to get really niche with different web and content properties across all those different subscribers and acquiring their way into that. Or this last year toward the end of 2015, we saw IBM buy The Weather Company for $2 billion.
Now, why did they buy the weather company? Well, it wasn't for the Weather Channel, it was for the data. They wanted to be able to use data and the things that subscribers and the weather provide are in the way of data, to provide contextual optimization for all the different things that they're doing. How can they make e-commerce servers provide their customers with the ability to say, if people are shopping for umbrellas while it's raining, they're featured on the home page of their website?
They can start to do that now by acquiring the audiences, as well as the content in the data that the weather company provides. So, here's the key thing that I want you to come away with this with, is that in each and every successful content marketing experience, it is the collection of assets, not anyone in particular,
that provides the strategic value. I'm going to repeat that. It is the collection of assets that provides strategic value, not anyone. Nobody ever said that the strategic value of my business is my blog post, or that it's this particular white paper, or this info-graphic really just killed it.
It is the collection, the thematic collection of assets. Look back at the slide that we just looked at, and you'll see, all of those are thematic collections of assets. A digital magazine, a resource center, an actual TV network in some cases, a print magazine, there are collections of assets, not anyone.
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