Fishbowl, one of the terrific Mediabistro blogs that are now part of Jupitermedia, scored a news scoop yesterday that Beliefnet.com was acquired by News Corp. on Monday.

Back to Beliefnet: For News Corp. to buy a site like Beliefnet surely shows that News Corp. is only at the beginning of its Internet buying spree. This is bullish news for content sites on virtually any topic. The Internet has finally achieved what I had predicted in the mid-1990s: that the Internet would spawn an enormous wave of vertical content sites way beyond what print was ever able to accomplish. Internet publisning is an economic wonder. Regardless of the number of readers, costs do not increase very much. With print, a publisher faces the economics of paper, printing, binding and postage. The Internet publisher has little to no incremental cost as readership increases. And now that the Internet is becoming part of every home and business worldwide the opportunities are greater and greater for vertical content sites to thrive (for both the consumer and the BtoB market).

The golden age of Internet acquisitions is upon us. Large media companies will be gorging on existing and promising content sites for years to come.

If I had time, I think I would work as a media banker buying and selling Web sites.