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CNET sneaks in European presence
Whither now ZDNET
CNET is taking the softly softly route to establishing its brand across Europe by launching local entry pages to its news.com site.
This means visitors from the UK, Germany and France will be directed to a CNET-style page containing local stories, when they try and visit news.com. A tab button at the top of the page will give the option to go direct to the US news site.
The uk.news.com site, which should go live within a month, will be populated with stories from ZDNET.co.uk. CNET owns ZDNET.
ZDNET's UK MD, Shobhan Gajjar, said the move had been done to make users aware there was a local site if they wanted it.
But what does this mean for ZDNET? It obviously increases CNET's options, but we think the body bag zipper could be pulled up across ZDNET's face any time now.
Not so, says Gajjar - CNET is committed to the brand. "ZDNET is already established in the UK, France, and Germany - there seems little point in calling it CNET. CNET's presence in the UK is ZDNET.co.uk."
So although uk.news.com will contain the same copy as ZDNET.co.uk - having both is not a waste of time. "It's just about how you package content," said Gajjar.
As for the rest of the ZDNET UK business, Gajjar says games site GameSpot is important to future plans, and there have been just seven redundancies in recent weeks. We'd heard there'd been slightly more and most of them were from GameSpot. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
