Znaim pays $15 million for a blog...Well, the unspoken thing we live with -- the elephant in the room -- is that Znaim is well past his sell-by date, and is still lumbering around media and financial circles based on a reputation earned as a City-Tv programmer back in the 1970s. Does that make him a 21st century media mavin? Survey says no.
Forewarned with that knowledge, I was nevertheless gobsmacked to see that he overpaid by a multiple of five to six times beyond any reasonable market value for the "BlogTO" site, which is somewhat popular with Toronto-area Gen-Xers (but offers none of the growth potential of Narcity.) More remarkably, Znaim paid in cash, which is another way of saying that BlogTO owner Timmy Shore, or his advisor, ain't dumb enough to acknowledge ZUM shares as being worth anything. Keep your shares, Znaim. Let's see your moan-nay.
Znaim will squeal that the acquisition makes sense because BlogTO is scalable, and that its local digital platform may be extended into other audiences in areas, offering other monitization possibilities. Track record says no. Timmy's effort to expand his empire into Montreal and Vancouver went nowhere in the blink of an eye.
So how do you reconcile Znaim's current vision, which seems fixed on having Marilyn, his roommate, lead televised singalongs at seniors' centers, with the BlogTO lifetime quest to help Gen-Xers locate the 416's ultimate falaffel?
And why didn't Znaim just buy up MediaCentral Corp. for around $2 million, which would have given him the same web traffic as BlogTO and the same demographic, plus a couple of under-capitalized print assets for free, thus saving shareholders $13 million in the process?
Or, if Znaim wants to do a digital transformation, why didn't he merge his moth-eaten empire with Vertical Scope, exchanging his nickle-dime shares for the $25 FORA stock?
That, old chums, is the unspoken thing we live with. Znaim's no longer relevant. He just don't get it.