IP Democracy: Fox Buys NewRoo

A few weeks back, Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn created a stir at a conference by stating that Fox had bought a company “in this room” without specifying which company it was. Well, Mike Arrington at TechCrunch let it be known yesterday that the company is NewRoo, a news aggregation company that hasn’t even launched yet. (Three guys, no venture capital.)

The price is reportedly less than $10 million, and it’s not entirely clear how NewRoo fits in with Fox. Arrington thinks that the user-generated customized pages enabled by NewRoo fits right in with New Corp.’s MySpace and Fox Sports.

While this is a small acquisition for Fox, there is a clear product synergy with their Myspace and Fox Sports online properties - users of those sites can create their own music/youth related content sites in the case of Myspace, or sports related news sites in the case of Fox Sports. Given Ross’ stated infatuation with user-generated content, it isn’t hard to see how NewRoo’s technology can add to their overall strategy of generating more page views without paying for the actual content generation.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on March 15, 2006 9:00 AM to IP Democracy