Geeknet Offloads Slashdot, SourceForce and Freecode to Dice Holdings

Barely a year after site co-founder Rob Malda left Slashdot, it’s been sold, along with SourceForce and Freecode. Dice Holdings, owners of the Dice.com career site, paid $20 million for the deal. Strikingly, $20m is roughly said to be the revenue that all three properties combined earn annually. Companies are generally valued much higher than their annual revenue, so it’s clear Geeknet simply wanted to off-load the weight to focus on other things – namely, taking ThinkGeek to the next level.

In 2005, Slashdot was valued at a staggering $150 million, so this minor sale puts another media giant on a similar path as Digg, which was once valued at about $200 million but sold for a mere $500,000 this past July.

Slashdot has a proven formula, and while not the powerhouse it once was, it’d be nice if Dice would leave the site as it is, and not risk killing it off entirely by changing it in ways that it thinks will improve things. The Slashdot crowd is a fickle one, so if the formula is left alone, it should remain just as successful as it is in this point in time.