News Corp pays $650m for IGN Entertainment

by Sam Matthews, Brand Republic 09-Sep-05, 08:50

LONDON - News Corporation is continuing on its internet acquisition trail having bought videogame and movie website company IGN Entertainment, which owns GameSpy and Rotten Tomatoes, for $650m (£354m).

IGN and its network of gaming sites including IGN.com, GameWeb, 3D Games, Team Xbox, Gamestats.com and movie-related content IGN Filmforce and Rotten Tomatoes, will become part of Rupert Murdoch's Fox Interactive Media unit, which includes other recent acquisitions MySpace.com and Scout Media.

Murdoch said: "With the acquisition of IGN and its 28m users, we have gone a long way toward achieving two of our key strategic objectives in our efforts to become a leading and profitable internet presence."

New Corporation claims Fox Interactive is currently the fourth-largest network in terms of monthly web impressions.

Murdoch expects Fox Interactive web traffic to increase to almost 70m unique users and more than 12bn page impressions a month, with the new acquisition.

Mark Jung, IGN Entertainment's chief executive officer, said IGN Entertainment will complement Fox's established internet sites FoxNews.com and FoxSports.com.

"We believe that Fox Interactive Media is an ideal fit with IGN Entertainment. With this combination, our users will enjoy access to a broad array of content and services covering video games, music, movies, sports and news, and our advertisers will benefit from enormous reach into a highly sought-after demographic."

Jung will retain his position as chief executive officer at IGN.

Seperately, Murdoch announced yesterday he was holding his second summit in just seven months on News Corporation's internet plans, with executives meeting to discuss the next stage of investment, having spent £314m since February.

The summit is due to take place on Friday and Saturday in Carmel, near Murdoch's Californian ranch, and comes following the announcement that News Corp is prepared to spend up to $2bn (£1.1bn) on internet acquisitions as it seeks to rival internet companies such as Yahoo!.

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