CBS News Acquiring Wallstrip, New Headache in Eeking Out Online Profits
Wallstrip - the Wall Street web video program featuring Lindsay Campbell trying to make the Nasdaq hilarious - is being snapped up by CBS News, we're told, for something in the $5 million range.
Context & Ripple Effects
Jossip reports CBS News is paying something near $5 million for Wallstrip, the daily web show where host Lindsay Campbell tries to make the Nasdaq entertaining, and TechCrunch ran the same figure the same day — unusually fast spread for a deal this small, though both frame the price, and the acquisition itself, as reported rather than confirmed.
The sharper angle is the part Jossip flags as confirmed: the buyout lands inside CBS News' ongoing struggle to eke out profits online, which makes Wallstrip less a trophy than another test of whether a network can convert a purchased web audience into revenue. The show's premise leans on the Nasdaq brand — the index whose March 10, 2000 peak of 5,048.62 still marks the dot-com boom's high-water mark.
First-order effects
- CBS News adds a web-native finance program and its on-camera personality, Lindsay Campbell, giving its online operation new content it now has to monetize against a backdrop of unresolved online losses.
- The circulating ~$5 million figure sets a public benchmark for what a single-host web series costs, whatever the final terms turn out to be.
Second-order effects
- Independent web video producers gain evidence that networks will pay single-digit millions for proven shows, strengthening the case for selling to a broadcaster over building a standalone business.
- Other news divisions scouting cheap web audiences now have a comparable deal to measure their own web-video bids against, pressuring them to move before prices rise.
Third-order effects
- If legacy broadcasters keep acquiring small web studios instead of building audiences themselves, web video drifts toward consolidation under TV-network ownership, with individual hosts becoming the scarce asset the deals are really pricing.
The trend: Broadcast news divisions are buying small web video studios outright to acquire online audiences they have struggled to build organically.