SoftBank Group Corporation is a sprawling, massively influential holding company that started and still has its headquarters

in Japan, but which today has influence around the world. SoftBank was started in the 1980s as an

electronics store, more specifically a computer parts store, selling hardware and software in the early years of the personal computer,

from within the then central hub of electronic component manufacturing, Tokyo Japan.

SoftBank got into publishing when it began producing magazines about personal computers in the early to mid-1980s,

and by the mid-90s, they'd gotten big enough to both go public, becoming a publicly traded

company on the Japanese stock market, and to purchase a United States-based publishing

company called Zip Davis Publishing for $2.1 billion. Zip Davis was the world's largest publisher

of computer magazines at the time, and SoftBank was the largest publisher of computer magazines,

and, importantly, the largest operator of computer trade shows in Japan at the time.

So this purchase made them immensely influential

with the personal computer world at a fortuitous time to be influential in that space. But it also

made them quite wealthy. All that ad space in those magazines meant they controlled 46% of the

$1.7 billion market for computer-related advertising in the United States at the time,

alongside the profits from all those trade shows, which became more popular and well-funded

every year. In the years following that acquisition, SoftBank acquired through Ziff Davis,

other publishing adjacent properties, like Black Friday.com,

mashable, geek.com, humble bundle, speedtest.net, the IGN network, which includes askmen.com,

and tech bargains.com, a fairly large number of well-trafficked sites, all of which, again,

add their overall advertising placement

opportunities and media-related supplementary income streams to that larger network, which in turn

adds to the size of SoftBanks' bank account. Ziff Davis, though an all-around successful

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