BNET

» see bnet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

BNET went public on 1 March 2007 after about two years running quietly in beta inside CNET Networks. The pitch was narrow and it never pretended otherwise: a web magazine for people who manage other people. Management and strategy on the editorial side, plus a library of white papers and case studies that CNET already owned and could finally point somewhere useful. Eric Schurenberg ran it as editor-in-chief out of San Francisco.

It worked faster than a trade title has any right to. comScore had BNET inside the top ten financial news and research sites in the United States from May 2007 through May 2008, which is a strange thing to say about a property that had only been public for two months when that run started. CNET was buying content in the same window, picking up FindArticles from LookSmart in November 2007, and BNET was the thing all of that archive material was supposed to feed.

A trade magazine for American middle managers was never going to reach Ankara. In 2007 I was midway through an engineering degree on a TTNet line, and the business web I touched was hardware pricing and forum signatures, not case studies about delegation. BNET is on this site because of how it ended rather than because I read it, which is a fair description of most business media from that decade.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the portfolio problem ~

CBS bought CNET Networks in 2008 and inherited a shelf of business brands that had been assembled by a company with different reasons. ZDNet had enterprise technology and TechRepublic had the people who ran it, while SmartPlanet arrived in 2009 for sustainability and cities and BNET held management. On an org chart that is four audiences. In an ad market it was one audience, and it was shrinking.

MoneyWatch was the piece CBS actually wanted, because it carried consumer finance and consumer finance carried advertisers. For a while BNET and MoneyWatch were described as partners. That word is usually a countdown.

~ the day the byline changed ~

On 27 March 2012 Jack Otter, executive editor, published a note under the headline that tells you everything: BNET is now CBS Moneywatch.com. The text welcomed readers to the new BNET.com, then explained that the new BNET.com was called something else. Channels got renamed, Business Owners became Small Business, and new sections appeared for markets and for technology.

Five years and twenty-six days, and the goodbye was written by the editor of the site that absorbed it. No farewell from anyone who had built the thing. A URL redirect and a masthead swap, done on a Tuesday.

~ what answers there now ~

The domain returns nothing at all today, not a parking page and not a redirect, just a connection that never completes. SmartPlanet was shut outright in 2013, and TechRepublic and ZDNet went to Red Ventures with the rest of CNET in 2020. Of the four business titles CBS inherited, the one that got the cleanest death was the one that was quietly renamed into its own competitor.

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