Discovery Communications Buys TreeHugger.com for $10 Million

TreeHugger.com was founded in 2004 by Graham Hill. The site is among the most successful environmental websites, with 1.4 million unique monthly visitors. It has served over 50 million pages, and has an archive of some 13,500 posts.

This is not the first such acquisition by Discovery Communications. Last year, the company's Animal Planet purchased Petfinder.com and PetsIncredible.com. According to the company, "Discovery is pursuing its multiplatform strategy of being the leading content provider across nonfiction genres around the world."

TreeHugger's Graham Hill says Discovery has "a commitment from the top of the company for over $50 million to create content, including programming for the world's first 24 hour green channel and in addition have allocated significant budget aimed at building the leading green web portfolio on the Internet."

"It's important to note that this purchase was not just for the domain name, but also for the content and traffic that the site has generated over the past few years. However, it's still a good sign for domain investors as a whole, especially those committed to building out their premium domain names," notes Peter Goggin, a partner at the domain name investment company Argonaut Ventures.

"This acquisition of TreeHugger.com is a bold move for Discovery Communications. The company's Planet Earth series was enormously popular, and they're now expanding on their reach in this area. I think we'll see a lot more such acquisitions of popular, content-rich websites that dominate select niche markets," he added.