Dice Holdings has acquired the online media business of Geeknet. This includes such notable tech sites as Slashdot, SourceForge and Freecode.
The acquisition price is $20 million, which the companies say is the same amount the properties generated in revenue in 2011.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the sites, Slashdot is a user-generated tech news site. You used to hear the term “slashdotted” a lot, when as site got so much traffic from the site that its servers crashed. There’s actually a sizable Wikipedia entry about the “Slashdot Effect”.
SourceForge is an open sources software site for developers, and Freecode is a large index of Linux, Unix and cross-platform software and mobile apps.
Slashdot gets over 5,300 comments a day and 3.7 million unique visitors per month. SourceForge gets 40 million unique monthly visitors, and about 80% of them are from outside of the United States, according to Geeknet. Freecode gets about 500,000 unique visitors per month.
“The acquisition of these premier technology sites fits squarely into our strategy of providing content and services that are important to tech professionals in their everyday work lives,” said Dice Holdings Chairman, President and CEO Scot Melland. “The SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis and significantly extends our company’s reach into the global tech community.”
“We are very pleased to find a new home for our media business, providing a platform for the sites and our media teams to thrive,” said Geeknet Chairman Ken Langone. “With this transaction completed, we will now focus our full attention on growing ThinkGeek.”
ThinkGeek is Geeknet’s online shopping site…for geeks.
