Ziff Davis
Ziff Davis, Inc. is an American digital media and Internet company. Founded in 1927 by William Bernard Ziff Sr. and Bernard George Davis, the company primarily owns technology- and health-oriented media websites, online shopping-related services, Internet connectivity services, gaming and entertainment brands, and cybersecurity and martech tools. Previously, the company was predominantly a publisher of hobbyist magazines.
History
''Popular Aviation''
The William B. Ziff Company, founded in 1920, was a successful Chicago advertising agency that secured advertising from national companies such as Procter & Gamble for virtually all African American weekly newspapers. In 1923, Ziff acquired E. C. Auld Company, a Chicago publishing house. Ziff's first venture in magazine publishing was Ziff's Magazine, which featured short stories, one-act plays, humorous verse, and jokes. The title was changed to America's Humor in April 1926.Bernard George Davis was the student editor of the University of Pittsburgh's humor magazine, the Pitt Panther, and was active in the Association of College Comics of the East. During his senior year he attended the association's convention and met William B. Ziff. When Davis graduated in 1927 he joined Ziff as the editor of America's Humor.
Ziff, who had been an aviator in World War I, created Popular Aviation in August 1927 that was published by Popular Aviation Publishing Company of Chicago, Illinois. Under editor Harley W. Mitchell it became the largest aviation magazine, with a circulation of 100,000 in 1929. The magazine's title became Aeronautics in June 1929 and the publishing company's name became Aeronautical Publications, Inc. The title was changed back to Popular Aviation in July 1930. The magazine became Flying in 1942 and is still published today by Firecrown. The magazine celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2017.
The company histories normally give the founding date as 1927. This is when B.G. Davis joined and Popular Aviation magazine started. However, it was not until 1936 that the company became the "Ziff-Davis Publishing Company". Davis was given a substantial minority equity interest in the company and was appointed a vice-president and director. He was later named president in 1946. Davis was a photography enthusiast and the editor of the Popular Photography magazine started in May 1937.
Fiction, hobbyist and bridal magazines
In early 1938, Ziff-Davis acquired the magazines Radio News and Amazing Stories. These were started by Hugo Gernsback but sold as a result of the Experimenter Publishing bankruptcy in 1929. Both magazines had declined since the bankruptcy but the resources of Ziff-Davis rejuvenated them starting with the April 1938 issues. Radio News was published until 1972. The magazine Popular Electronics, derived from Radio News, was begun in 1955 and published until 1985. Amazing Stories was a leading science fiction magazine and Ziff Davis soon added a new companion, Fantastic Adventures. In 1954 FA was merged into the newer magazine Fantastic, founded in 1952 to great initial success. ZD published a number of other pulp magazines and, later, digest-sized fiction magazines during the 1940s and 1950s, and continued to publish Amazing and Fantastic until 1965.Ziff-Davis published comic books during the early 1950s, operating by their own name and also the name Approved Comics. Eschewing superheroes, they published horror, crime, sports, romance, and Western comics, though most titles did not last more than a few issues. Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was the art director of the comics line; other notable creators who worked for Ziff-Davis Comics included John Buscema, Sid Greene, Bob Haney, Sam Kweskin, Rudy Lapick, Richard Lazarus, Mort Leav, Paul S. Newman, George Roussos, Mike Sekowsky, Ernie Schroeder, and Ogden Whitney. In 1953, the company mostly abandoned comics, selling its most popular titles—the romance comics Cinderella Love and Romantic Love, the Western Kid Cowboy, and the jungle adventure Wild Boy of the Congo—to St. John Publications. Ziff-Davis continued to publish one title, G.I. Joe, until 1957, a total of 51 issues.
Upon Bill Ziff's death in 1953, William B. Ziff Jr., his son, returned from Germany to lead the company. In 1958, Bernard Davis sold Ziff Jr. his share of Ziff Davis to found Davis Publications, Inc.; Ziff Davis continued to use the Davis surname as Ziff-Davis.
From 1958, under the direction of sole owner Bill Ziff Jr., a polymath with a photographic memory, Ziff-Davis became a successful publisher of enthusiast magazines, purchasing titles like Car and Driver, and tailoring content for enthusiasts as well as purchasing agents ; the company was able to attract advertising money that other, general-interest publications were losing.
In 1958, Ziff-Davis began publishing a magazine, HiFi and Music Review, for the growing hobby of high fidelity equipment. Ultimately, the magazine evolved into Stereo Review. ZD also became a prolific publisher of photography and boating magazines during this period, and such magazines as Modern Bride; after the sale of Fantastic and Amazing in 1965, their editor Cele Goldsmith Lalli began working on the bridal magazines, becoming a notable and influential editor in that field before retirement.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the company's success increased with this strategy, and a rapidly expanding interest in electronics and computing. With titles such as PC Magazine, Popular Electronics, and Computer Shopper, Ziff Davis became the leading technology magazine business.
Ziff Davis sold the majority of its consumer magazines to CBS and its trade magazines to News Corporation in 1984, keeping its computer magazines.
Television stations
In 1979, Ziff Davis expanded into broadcasting, after an acquisition of television stations originally owned by greeting card company Rust Craft. Ziff Davis's stations included NBC affiliates WROC-TV in Rochester, New York and WRCB-TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee, CBS affiliates WEYI-TV in Saginaw, Michigan, WRDW-TV in Augusta, Georgia and WSTV-TV in Steubenville, Ohio, and ABC affiliate WJKS-TV in Jacksonville, Florida. These stations would be sold to other owners by the mid-1980s—most of these would become owned by a new ownership group, "Television Station Partners", the exceptions being WRCB and WJKS.| City of license / Market | Station | Channel | Years owned | Current status |
| Jacksonville, FL | WJKS-TV | 17 | 1979–1982 | The CW affiliate WCWJ, owned by Graham Media Group |
| Augusta, GA | WRDW-TV | 12 | 1979–1983 | CBS affiliate owned by Gray Television |
| Saginaw–Flint, MI | WEYI-TV | 25 | 1979–1983 | NBC affiliate owned by Howard Stirk Holdings |
| Rochester, NY | WROC-TV | 8 | 1979–1983 | CBS affiliate owned by Nexstar Media Group |
| Steubenville, OH–Wheeling, WV | WTOV-TV | 9 | 1979–1983 | NBC affiliate owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group |
| Chattanooga, TN | WRCB-TV | 3 | 1979–1982 | NBC affiliate owned by Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. |
Technology magazines and web properties
Ziff Davis first started technology-themed publications during 1954, with Popular Electronics and, more briefly, Electronics World. This resulted more or less directly in its interest in home-computer magazines. From that time, Ziff Davis became a major publisher of computer and Internet-related publishing. It acquired PC Magazine in 1982, and the trade journal MacWEEK in 1988. In 1991, the company initiated ZiffNet, a subscription service that offered computing information to users of CompuServe. This grew into the news website ZDNet, launched in late 1994. In 1995 it initiated the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the site Yahoo!.On August 20, 1994, Ziff-Davis entered the television industry with the premiere of The Personal Computing Show, a program that aired on Saturday mornings on CNBC, America's Talking and the Jones Computing Network. The Personal Computing Show, co-hosted by Jim Louderback and Gina Smith, targeted a growing demographic of personal computer owners and demonstrated how to purchase, install, maintain and repair personal computers and peripheral devices such as printers. Shortly after The Personal Computing Show premiere, Ziff-Davis revealed plans to produce a second show in October 1994 named PC Update, a half-hour Sunday morning news program hosted by Leo Laporte and focusing on the computer industry. According to Ziff-Davis spokesman Gregory Jarboe, The Personal Computing Show was unsuccessful due to its relegation to odd channels and timeslots.
Owner William Bernard Ziff Jr. had wanted to give the business to his sons—Daniel, Dirk and Robert—but they did not want the responsibility. In October 1994, he announced the sale of the publishing group to Forstmann Little & Company for US$1.4 billion. A small Foster City-based television operation named "ZD-TV" was listed as a company asset. Ziff-Davis was then sold to SoftBank a year later.
In April 1996, Ziff-Davis announced the establishment of ZDTV as a San Francisco-based unit specializing in the production of television and internet broadcasts, which would allow the publisher to showcase its products. Its first project was to develop The Site, a daily hour-long prime time news show co-hosted by Soledad O'Brien about the increasing social and economic effects of technology. The program aired on the cable news network MSNBC, which launched on July 15, 1996. It was the third San Francisco-based television program specializing in technology after CNET Central and Cyberlife. According to Ziff-Davis chief executive Larry Wangberg, San Francisco was chosen as ZDTV's headquarters for its proximity to Silicon Valley and easy access to Multimedia Gulch-based talent.
On May 6, 1997, Ziff-Davis announced its plan to launch ZDTV as a 24-hour interactive cable network specializing in computers and the internet. The publisher put $100 million behind the project and planned to debut the ZDTV channel in early 1998. Projected programming for the channel included talk shows on the impact of technology, business-oriented shows evaluating investments in high-tech stocks, and reviews of software and hardware. Children's programming was also planned for the weekends. The channel had 11 initial charter advertisers, including IBM, Gateway 2000, Microsoft, and Charles Schwab. Ziff-Davis chairman and CEO Eric Hippeau cited the increasing presence of computers in cable television homes and workspaces as motivation for filling the niche of programming about computers, saying "This is a huge audience and it will only get bigger". Wangberg, who would be made the network's CEO, proclaimed Ziff-Davis's ambition of ZDTV becoming "to computing what CNN is to news, what ESPN is to sports". Although Ziff-Davis intended to continue producing The Site for MSNBC following ZDTV's launch, the show was canceled in September 1997 as a result of the network's shift toward an all-news format. In December 1997, Ziff-Davis revealed at the Western Cable Trade Show in Anaheim that it had secured agreements with four cable operators to carry the network: Prime Cable in Las Vegas, Harron Communications in Detroit, Televue in Georgia, and Prestige Cable in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.
Ziff-Davis's initial public offering was announced on February 18, 1998, delaying the launch of ZDTV. The network was separated from Ziff-Davis's publishing operations so as to prevent the former's start-up losses from impacting the latter's balance sheet. The network launched on May 11, 1998, on cable systems in Las Vegas, Detroit, parts of Georgia near Atlanta, and parts of Maine. In November, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's holding company Vulcan Ventures invested $54 million in ZDTV, granting it a 33-percent stake in the network.
Although ZDTV was critically acclaimed, it struggled to gain a foothold on certain cable lineups, in part because Ziff-Davis eschewed the types of launch fees to cable operators—ranging from $100 to $150 million—that other new channels were providing. It strained to achieve carriage from AT&T/TCI cable lineups and was deemed unprofitable. In an effort to sell company assets to reduce debt and boost its share price, Ziff-Davis put ZDTV up for sale on July 16, 1999. On July 21, 1999, the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker "ZDZ". In November 1999, Vulcan purchased the remaining two-thirds of ZDTV's shares in a transaction that was completed on January 21, 2000. The deal was worth $204.8 million.
On January 28, 2000, Ziff-Davis announced that it would sell its tradeshow unit, ZD Events, and eliminate its two tracking stocks as part of an effort to restructure the company. It also sold its magazine division to Willis Stein & Partners L.P. for $780 million. In July 2000, CNET Networks agreed to acquire Ziff-Davis Inc. for $1.6 billion in stock. The combined company was considered the eighth-largest internet company.