Multimedia conglomerate News Corporation teamed with investment bank Allen & Co. to sell off its IGN Entertainment division.
IGN is a network of websites primarily focused on video games and pop culture. It ranks in the top 500 most-trafficked sites on the Internet according to monitoring site Alexa. It covers a spectrum of topics under different channels. In addition to the popular Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 channels, it also has hubpages for television, movies, and technology.
In 2005, News Corp. purchased the entire network of IGN websites for $650 million. The auction is expected to net around $100 million according to The Wall Street Journal.
This will be another dot-com loss for News Corp. which sold Myspace.com for $35 million in 2011 after purchasing it for $580 million in 2005.
News Corp. decided to go with the auction after failing to reach a deal in negotiations with interested buyers. Break Media, which owns Break.com, and online-advertising-network SAY Media are both interested in acquiring IGN, the WSJ report says.
In May 2011, IGN padded its gaming network with the purchase of publisher Hearst’s UGO websites, which includes 1UP.com. The purpose of that merger was to aid in the eventual spin-off of IGN into its own company. Former IGN general manager Roy Bahat would run that new company, but the spin-off never came to pass. Bahat left IGN in August.