Purch now owns both AnandTech and Tom's Hardware

Earlier this year AnandTech founder Anand Lal Shimpi retired from technology publishing to take up a position at Apple. Now news reaches us that AnandTech has been sold to Purch, an American online publishing company formerly known as TechMediaNetwork.

Interestingly, this means former archrivals AnandTech and Tom's Hardware are now owned by the same company. Back in the late 90s there was heavy competition between AnandTech and Tom's Hardware but this subsided over the years. The Tom's Hardware network was acquired by Purch in 2013.

Before his departure, Anand spent almost a year meeting with all of the big names in the publishing space, both traditional and new media players. The goal was to find AnandTech a home with a partner that had a sustainable business model (similar to AnandTech’s), but could add the investment and existing reach to allow the site to better realize its potential. That search led to a number of interesting potential partners; it was a refreshing experience to say the least knowing that there are groups in the world who really value good content. Ultimately that search brought AnandTech to Purch.

Purch met the requirements: they have a sustainable business model, are profitable and have the sort of reach AnandTech needs to really hit the next level. More fundamentally however, Purch’s values are in line with AnandTech’s. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that Purch acquired one of AnandTech’s biggest competitors in the late 1990s: Tom’s Hardware. Purch had already demonstrated a value for the sort of deep, long form content AnandTech was known for. In meeting with the Purch business and editorial teams, there was a clear interest in further developing AnandTech’s strengths as well as feeding back AnandTech’s learnings into the rest of the Purch family.