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Pete Cashmore: the man behind Mashable
As CNN prepares to buy Mashable for £127 million, we chart Pete Cashmore's journey - the 26 year-old who started the social media news site in his bedroom and is now set to net millions.
The so-called ‘Brad Pitt of the blogosphere’ founded Mashable in his bedroom in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2005, aged 19.
Saying he wanted to create something which could “make a difference”, but from the comfort of his bed, the teenage Scot created Mashable.
Since 2005, he has divided his time between his home town of Aberdeen and the bright lights of Silicon Valley and New York, growing his 40-strong team of full-time bloggers and contributors.
Cashmore’s influence within and beyond technology circles has grown exponentially – netting him more than 2.7 million Twitter followers and leading to him being crowned the most influential Briton on the microblogging site in 2009.
At the time, in an interview with The Telegraph, he said: “Social media is becoming the web, and social media is becoming the media. It's been a nice area to be covering these last few years, and we've been able to grow as a blog alongside it. There's very little on the web that hasn't had this social element built in to it. It's integrated in to every site you use now."
Things have come a long way since 2006 and 2007, he said, when companies scrambled to build their own platforms to leverage web users' appetite for user-generated content, social interaction and sharing.
"You were just left with lots of sites that asked you to join their new social network, meaning people had to keep creating new profiles, creating new networks. It wasn't ideal," he recalled.
Mashable now attracts 50 million page views a month and generates the majority of its revenue from display advertising.
Cashmore, who is reportedly dating the model Lisa Bettany, has since been featured in Time Magazine’s 100 list in 2010 and ranked 25th in Forbes magazine’s web celebrity list.
The Telegraph also named him a notable Briton in 2010 – in its Britons of the Year list.
He has been blogging for CNN.com for the last couple of years but since the leak of the report, linking the news organisation to Mashable, he has been unusually tight-lipped.
Reports say that the deal could be closed by the end of play today.