Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million

In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company.

The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.

The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.

Longtime digital media exec Larry Kramer is on its board and ContentNext recently hired media exec Nathan Richardson as its CEO.

Sources said ContentNext would continue being run independently after the Guardian purchase.

This sale comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica, a much larger tech-focused site, to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million.

More to come soon.

But until then, here’s a video I did with Ali just over a year ago in a when I visited his then-new offices in Santa Monica.