IGN Gobbles Up Rotten Tomatoes

IGN.com is purchasing film web site Rotten Tomatoes after more than a year of speculative talks of a merger. Rotten Tomatoes, like IGN, is a San Francisco Bay Area-based company and operates on a small staff of mostly young employees who write about films, videogames, celebrities, and other entertainment-related news, while aggregating reviews from numerous publications. In the last four years, IGN has struggled financially, losing about $145 million since its inception, according to the East Bay Business Times. But the company finally turned a profit in early 2003, was bought by an investment firm last August, and was taken private. No financial details of the agreement were released as of press time.