BtoB media power in the 1990s was epitomized by Ziff Davis.  Yesterday, what remains of ZD filed for bankruptcy.  The history on this mess is profound.  Lots of mistakes were made.  None of the mistakes were made by the Ziff family that sold the business in 1994 for a ton of money to the private equity firm of Forstmann-Little.  A year or so later Forstmann sold the company for about a $1 billion profit to Softbank.  Softbank then went about methodically destroying a great company. 

I will not go into all the odd and crazy things that Softbank did to start ZD on the road to destruction, but will highlight one point.  In the late 1990s Softbank decided to sell ZD.  It made a series of sales.  Perhaps the most disastrous sale for the future was that of the Web properties, ZDnet.com, to Cnet and allowing Cnet to continue to use the ZD online brand!  While ZDnet still exists, it has become a lost goldmine in the Cnet empire.  More importantly, however, Ziff Davis had now lost its Web assets, not to mention an important part of its brand.

Along came Willis Stein Partners of Chicago to buy the remaining parts of Ziff Davis (less trade shows and ZDnet). I wrote in the now defunct Business 2.0 magazine in September of 2000 that Willis Stein had made a huge mistake in buying ZD for approximately $780 million (In this article I also predicted that United Business Media of England would rue the day they had purchased CMP Media - another tech trade magazine publisher - for $920 million).  My main reason for concluding this was that ZD lacked Internet clout since these assets now belonged to Cnet. I also saw that tech trade print magazine publishing was facing ultimate death.  But Willis Stein had just made a financial killing with a consumer magazine company and thought it could do the same with ZD.  Little did they know that they were buying into a swampy future in which advertising would begin moving to the Web.  And little did they know that they would never be able to overcome the loss of ZDnet (since Willis Stein was clueless about the future of the Internet).

Further confusion. ZD recently sold off its Enterprise assets to Insight Venture Partners.  This means that presently there are three ZD-like entities in the arena: Ziff Davis Media (bankrupt); ZDnet.com (part of Cnet); and ZD Enterprise (independent).  Perhaps the Insight folks should consider changing the name of their new property?

As an aside: In the summer of 2005 I offered to buy through Jupitermedia all of Ziff Davis (this included the Enterprise portion as well as the part that went bankrupt) for assumption of the then $350 million of debt.  I was turned down.  The seller felt that a fair price was $850M cash and assumption of debt.  I laughed. End of story.