Two Tech Blogs Now One

Venture-backed tech-media company GigaOM is buying paidContent publisher ContentNext as part of a wave of consolidation in the business.

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The universe of online publishers covering technology is shrinking, with the announcement today that GigaOM is buying ContentNext from the Guardian Group Ltd.

The terms of the deal were not revealed, but it bulks up the capacity of GigaOM to cover technology and startups on the East and West Coasts through ContentNext publications such as paidContent, giving the combined sites the firepower of about 20 writers and editors. All told, the combined company will have about 55 employees, including those dedicated to advertising sales and event production.

Further, GigaOM will likely be able to add to its base of 4.5 million unique users per month.

It also isn’t the first such sale in recent years. In 2010, AOL snapped up the Silicon Valley must-read TechCrunch, leading to the eventual ouster of that site’s founder, Michael Arrington. Say Media in December bought popular tech blog ReadWriteWeb.

Om Malik, the founder of GigaOM, explains the logic of today’s deal this way:

Now, why are we doing this deal, clearly the biggest of our five-and-a-half-year history? Two simple but equally powerful reasons—the first and perhaps most important reason: people. I have been an admirer of paidContent’s editorial team from the very beginning of its journey. Rafat Ali (the founder of ContentNext) and Staci Kramer were two of my favorite writers in the early days of professional blogging. And while Rafat (who is on our board of advisers) has moved on to new things, I am glad to have Staci join us. She has been instrumental in building ContentNext from the ground up, and in addition to writing, she has been building the company’s event business. I am thrilled to announce that she will remain the editor of paidContent.

Guardian News & Media, publisher of The Guardian, will take a minority stake in venture-backed GigaOM, along with current investors True Ventures, Alloy Ventures, and Reed Elsevier Ventures.