Brill Holdings Acquires Powerful Media Assets

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 2001

In a deal announced in early April, Powerful Media, owner of lnside.com and Inside, exchanged its assets for a stake In Brill Media Holdings. The Brill company partnered with Primedia in January to create Media Central, a group of magazines and newsletters.

"What we are presenting is a real solid plan, with a backbone of 50,000 or 60,000 paying customers," says Brill Media Holdings CEO Steve Brill, alluding to Inside's customer base. "The real plan is that finding quality information on the Internet is going to command a price."

Brill says that Inside.com will become a Web portal for all Media Central properties, which include this magazine, and that the company will charge readers to download specialized content. The plan is based on the success of Kagan.com, a media-business-news Web site owned by Brill Media Holdings, which "earned something like $300,000 in revenue last year," through pay-for-download transactions, according to Brill. The time frame for the creation of this portal was not disclosed.

Brill also announced that three-year-old monthly media magazine Brill's Content will merge with the biweekly inside, which launched in December, to become the monthly Inside Content. The title will launch in summer or early fall.