Vox Media buys Group Nine

Two weeks, two do. And now four digital companies are turning into two. Prepare more about it.

Then taken from Monday’s news reports that Vox Media – my boss – is about to find Group Nine, a publisher behind retailers like The Dodo and NowThis. The proclamation of the treaty, first described in Wall Street Journal confirmed via email from the company as soon as possible, it comes just days after BuzzFeed completed the purchase of Complex Networks, the publisher is looking for guys who love hip-hop and shoes.

The BuzzFeed-Complex alliance came as BuzzFeed went public, the move of his boss Jonah Peretti said he wanted to make it because it would help him find more media companies. This new agreement stipulates that you do not have to be in the public domain to purchase a media company: Vox is private, as well as Group Nine.

But co-op machines – we can talk about for a minute – are less important than the big picture: Together, the men and women who run the film industry have been talking about mergers for some time. Hope for the word: The same combination of accessibility, performance best, most beautiful. Front row: If we do not combine, we cannot.

And now mashups are happening, in a way.

BuzzFeed, for example, had already acquired HuffPost, the digital broadcaster Peretti had started with before setting up his own company; he and Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer had already talked about merging their two companies. Two years ago, Vox Media bought New York Magazine, and has been capturing small media companies – last month, for example, took over a podcast studio. Criminal Procedure. Deputy CEO of Media Nancy Dubuc, who bought Refinery 29 in 2019, also made it clear that. he thinks his business needs to be connected. And Dotdash, the digital publishing arm of Barry Diller’s IAC, has just swallowed up publisher Meredith and his library of titles, including the so-called Time Inc.

Covetousness does not make this possible: The Athletic, a sports betting site, has been looking for buyers for some time, but could not find one that could pay the price they wanted. Axios, a former Politico publisher, was in talks with German publisher Axel Springer before the deal ended.

And Group Nine alone wanted to find other companies. Earlier this year, he had created an empty SPAC company – The same BuzzFeed machine used to go public and buy Complex. Monday’s news seems to acknowledge that the Ninth Group did not find the company it wants to buy, or which it wants to sell. (Now the ownership of the Ninth Group in SPAC will move to Vox Media, which can do … something.)

The marketing strategy for both – real and organized – is great: Keep it big, ideas go, and it makes it easy to sell ads, sign up, or both. And in the meantime you should mention the two digital models of Google and Facebook, and argue that integration is the solution to this. But to be clear: Not all of these companies combined could be competitors to Google or Facebook; just because having more people makes it easier to attract advertising dollars, time – or subscription companies, big companies have more to sell.

So if integration helps publishers survive, then … okay? Of course, combining printers means that titles and other styles you like can be incorporated. But it is hoped that more people will survive in this way than they would have been.

What the information goes: This is an all-encompassing consensus, meaning that investors in Group Nine – including Discovery, a developer trying to acquire Warner Media – could own 25 percent on Vox Media. Vox Media, meanwhile, has already taken a subscription to Comcast. That’s why two of the world’s largest media companies can have shares in the same movement – though I’m not sure one of them cares about this.

And when Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told us in a company email Monday that he “has no plans for recent publicity,” this is what you do as a front-runner: The Wall Street Journal says Vox. Media, if this acquisition continues, will make $ 700 million in revenue next year, with $ 100 million in profits; BuzzFeed makes the same numbers for itself.

In addition, what will happen to investors may be what the company wants to start making advertisers soon: We have things for everyone. I surveyed some of Vox’s competitors on Monday and heard a number of financial statements that the company was about to find: “You are buying a pet,” snapped one official. But if people want to buy ads on it pet site, and the rental of the pets helps me to be an employee, I will not worry.