Ziff Davis has offices in San Francisco and New York City, but operates brands represented in 45 countries and in 17 languages. All total it reaches more than 40 million tech buyers. The company ended the print publication of its 27-year-old flagship title, PC Magazine , and took the magazine online only in 2007. It made the move to cut costs; it was an acknowledgement of the fact that PC Magazine readers had been increasingly migrating to the publication's website.

Mergers and Acquisitions

The company has spent the last couple of years making disposals and acquisitions to offer a balanced portfolio of media assets. In 2013 it bought IGN Entertainment, a network of video game and entertainment-related websites.

In 2012 Ziff Davis sold several media assets to QuinStreet, a direct marketing company, for an undisclosed amount. The assets sold included websites eWeek.com, CIOInsight.com, Baseline.com, ChannelInsider.com, and WebBuyersGuide.com. QuinStreet also purchased an email and telephone subscriber database from Ziff Davis.

The company made a key targeted acquisition and product launch in 2011 when it acquired LogicBuy, a provider of tech deals and coupons. It made the purchase to provide contextual deals and coupons related to the products users are researching. Ziff Davis also launched ad targeting platform BuyerBase, which collects activity related to tech search queries, product codes, model numbers, and related content on more than 120 tech-oriented websites to better connect consumers with ads.

Company Background

The current iteration of Ziff Davis was formed in 2000 from the ashes of Ziff-Davis Inc., one of the top tech publishers of the 1990s dot com boom. When the bubble burst, Willis Stein & Partners and James Dunning (former Ziff-Davis chairman and CEO) purchased the magazine operations to form Ziff Davis Media, while rival CNET Networks acquired the online operations of ZDNet. (CNET was later absorbed into CBS Interactive.)