But there have been signs that the company is serious about constructing a digital business that is less beside the point. Soon after getting his hands on Wired.com, Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the digital division of the parent company, moved to buy Reddit.com, a social news site along the lines of Digg, although smaller.

Last week, all the attention was focused on the $1.8 billion grab by CBS for eyeballs with the purchase of CNet. But during the same week, Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, a small but very influential Web tech site; Webmonkey, a site for Web developers that will be restarted today; and Hot Wired, a storied brand from early Internet days  which ran the first banner ad ever. The price was not disclosed, but the company probably spent another $25 million on the acquisition, according to executives there familiar with the deal.

Between the $50 million already invested, and another $50 million that may end up being spent on discreet, small acquisitions, Condé Nast has essentially re-geeked Wired. Much of the allure of the acquired sites is harvesting the bright young things who thought them up. But apart from all that the brain-collecting, executives at Condé Nast said that with the new properties at Wired Digital, the company will now have a male-skewing audience of about 19 million unique visitors, which will put them in the neighborhood of Forbes.com and the various Dow Jones Web sites.

Of course, every big media company is buying digital properties  in a landgrab either for audience or bragging rights. Condé Nast’s tack is different. It has a long history of financing impresarios and remaining patient, going back to Alexander Liberman, a Russian immigrant who arrived at the company in 1941 as a designer and became its protean editorial director. Tina Brown crossed an ocean to bring Vanity Fair back from the brink and then picked up The New Yorker and gave it a good tug. Anna Wintour, left to her own devices, turned Vogue into a behemoth, large enough to spin off Teen Vogue and Men’s Vogue, as well.

True to form, the captains of the Condé Nast Death Star have not meddled with kids from Reddit  it was founded by a couple of students at the University of Virginia  any more than they have told Ms. Wintour what cover models to put on Vogue.

“We did not buy these sites to dictate what they should be doing,” said Mr. Newhouse, sitting in a borrowed office in the huge headquarters built by his father, Donald Newhouse, and his uncle, S. I. Newhouse. “There is a debate among big media companies about whether you achieve scale in digital businesses through big acquisitions, and all the cost and overhead that goes with it, or whether you do what we are doing, which is to lay the groundwork for a strategy that allows for real growth over time.” (He didn’t mention CNet, but he didn’t have to.)

David Carey, the group president with oversight over Portfolio, Wired, the company’s golf magazines and the ad sales at Wired Digital, would like to see a digital division that helps the company, which has always leaned on fashion-oriented print publications, make money off of a business audience as well.