Religion News Service reports this week that Beliefnet, which consistently battles with BibleGateway.com to be the largest religious site online, has sold to Virginia-based BN Media after only being up for sale for a few months. The full RNS story by Alfredo Garcia may be found below.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought Beliefnet in 2007 in an apparent effort to build a faith-oriented business unit, uniting its related properties in HarperCollin’s Zondervan unit and Fox Faith. What is interesting in this acquisition is that Beliefnet and BN Media appear to have very different missions and corporate cultures. Beliefnet has distinguished itself for interfaith content with a light inspirational tone where BN Media is characterized by CBN-styled evangelical video programming through its subsidiary CrossBridge and the sale of telecommunications services through its Affinity4 program that gives ten percent of proceeds to consumer-selected charities.
Will Beliefnet survive as it is, become something new, or simply have its traffic harvested for product sales as long as the current audience hangs on? It will be interesting to watch. Historically, religion and business interests can make strange bedfellows if ministry is left in the outer room.
Beliefnet sold to Virginia media company
by Alfredo Garcia (used with permission)
(RNS) A small Virginia-based media company that specializes in
channeling a small portion of consumer spending to charity has acquired
Beliefnet, a leading online website devoted to multi-faith news,
commentary and content.
BN Media LLC focuses on the “vast online market for spirituality and
inspiration” by “bringing audio-visual and written content to the masses
while helping people make a difference for their favorite nonprofit
organization,” according to a news release.
Over the past seven weeks, BN Media participated in what CEO Steve
Halliday called a “whirlwind romance” of purchasing Beliefnet from
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
With the acquisition of Beliefnet, BN Media builds on its existing
relationship between Beliefnet and its subsidiaries, Affinity4 and Cross
Bridge, which provides spirituality-based video and media.
“We are very pleased with how our online community is growing,”
Halliday said. “We recognized both the tangible assets of Beliefnet …
as well as the intangibles, in particular, its excellent reputation for
providing high quality, diverse inspirational content.”
Beliefnet is one of the largest online sources for multi-faith
spirituality and inspiration content. It has more than 14 million
newsletter subscribers and an average of 3 million unique visitors per
month to its blogs, articles, videos, devotionals, photo galleries,
social networking tools and interviews.
BN Media’s Affinity4 has raised more than $76 million in funding
through “affinity-based marketing” for nonprofit organizations,
charities and ministerial organizations. Affinity4 offers
telecommunications products to purchasers who have selected to support
charities and giving 10 percent of profits to the corresponding
nonprofit.
“We’re quite excited about the opportunity to go ahead with these
three associates,” Halliday said. “We’ll be all structured to work
together … to promote video and promote giving and all the wonderful
content that Beliefnet already has.”
Although Halliday could not divulge the exact number of Beliefnet
employees who lost jobs in the transition, he said BN Media is “very
sorry for those folks and certainly wish them the best.”
Beth-Ann Eason, GM and COO of Beliefnet, seemed positive about the
merger in spite of the staff cutbacks. She viewed it as “a fantastic way
for the three of us to accelerate each others’ business and for us to
… continue to fulfill our mission.”
