Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
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Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
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Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#2Ex-Ziff'er here. That company seems to exist to be sold. Back in late 1990's it was split and sold: Things like Gamespot and TechTV came out of it. Now, what's being sold is a husk of the old media empire. Kinda like Atari: mostly name, and a few remaining properties.
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#3Back in the day mashable seemed like a competitor to TechCrunch, with a focus on tech news and trends. Then they pivoted toward viral content, and were personally never a destination again.
It seemed a weird move even at the time. Why would you want to build a business that's contingent upon catching the zeitgeist in a bottle? That's so incredibly hard.
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#4Ex-Ziff'er here. That company seems to exist to be sold. Back in late 1990's it was split and sold: Things like Gamespot and TechTV came out of it. Now, what's being sold is a husk of the old media empire. Kinda like Atari: mostly name, and a few remaining properties.
I remember when they bought and/or sold just about every gaming magazine I liked in the late 90s and 00s, notably Computer Gaming World (and maybe Computer Games Strategy Plus?). Ziff Davis has always felt like this treadmill of companies, with every decade looking different.
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#5Back in the day mashable seemed like a competitor to TechCrunch, with a focus on tech news and trends. Then they pivoted toward viral content, and were personally never a destination again. It seemed a weird move even at the time. Why would you want to build a business that's contingent upon catching the zeitgeist in a bottle? That's so incredibly hard.
If you look at raw traffic numbers Mashable is far bigger than Techcrunch and far more profitable.
What you are feeling and seeing is that the media is turned into a hyper-partisan machine where any issue discussed is in the context of extremes. It drives emotion, creates and drives viral content, and drives revenue. However, it doesn't produce substantive content one would find meaningful. It doesn't pay.
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#6Back in the day mashable seemed like a competitor to TechCrunch, with a focus on tech news and trends. Then they pivoted toward viral content, and were personally never a destination again. It seemed a weird move even at the time. Why would you want to build a business that's contingent upon catching the zeitgeist in a bottle? That's so incredibly hard.
If you look at raw traffic numbers Mashable is far bigger than Techcrunch and far more profitable. What you are feeling and seeing is that the media is turned into a hyper-partisan machine where any issue discussed is in the context of extremes. It drives emotion, creates and drives viral content, and drives revenue. However, it doesn't produce substantive content one would find meaningful. It doesn't pay.
A good example of wealth extraction vs wealth creation.
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#7Same parent company that recently bought Humble Bundle.
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#8Comparisons:
Mashable: $46M raised[0], 15M MAU[1] and $35-40M p.a in revenue[2] (sold for $50M)
Business Insider: $55M raised, 76M MAU, $50M+ rev (sold at $442M[5])
Refinery29: $125M raised, 27M MAU, $100M+ rev
Vox: $307M raised[4], 170M MAU, $100M+ rev
Buzzfeed: $496M raised, 200M+ MAU, $280-300M rev (was $350M - updated thanks)
HuffPo: $37M raised, 126M MAU, $30M+ rev (sold for $316M)
TechCrunch: $0 raised, 5M+ MAU, ? rev (sold for $25-30M)
Medium: $132M raised, 60M+ MAU, ? rev
Cracked: $0 raised, 10M+ MAU, $12M+ rev (sold for $39M[6])
Margins and growth are the diff between selling for 1.5x revenue and 10x revenue[7] - clearly a few models, where you either raise a little and do well with low headcount and organic audience, or raise $40M+ and set an expectation of getting near 100M MAU with $40M+ p.a revenue with high margins (~50%) and growth
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mashable
[1] https://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/MashableMediaKit.pdf
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mashable-could-be-for-sal...
[3] http://adage.com/article/media/private-equity-plowing-money-...
[4] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vox-media
[5] http://fortune.com/2015/09/29/business-insider-axel-springer...
[6] https://www.recode.net/2016/4/12/11586060/cracked-demand-med...
[7] https://www.poynter.org/news/how-much-digital-media-company-...
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#9Comparisons: Mashable: $46M raised[0], 15M MAU[1] and $35-40M p.a in revenue[2] (sold for $50M) Business Insider: $55M raised, 76M MAU, $50M+ rev (sold at $442M[5]) Refinery29: $125M raised, 27M MAU, $100M+ rev Vox: $307M raised[4], 170M MAU, $100M+ rev Buzzfeed: $496M raised, 200M+ MAU, $280-300M rev (was $350M - updated thanks) HuffPo: $37M raised, 126M MAU, $30M+ rev (sold for $316M) TechCrunch: $0 raised, 5M+ MAU…
The Wall Street Journal is reporting [1] that BuzzFeed is set to fall short of their $350m 2017 sales target by 15% to 20%. So a better number on that might be $280m to $300m.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzzfeed-set-to-miss-revenue-ta...
Re: Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis
#10Mashable, notably, is often credited with kicking off the much-derided "pivot to video" trend: https://www.recode.net/2016/4/7/11585950/mashable-fires-news...
But the buyout is sad to me because, if you break it down, it was a really great example of technology blog getting launched by a guy in his bedroom and that guy finding major success with it. There was a time that Mashable was so prominent in the social sphere that a new article of theirs could trend on Twitter just because of the source.
Certainly, the company's never gone away (and it's produced some pretty amazing alums in the journalism world, it should be said—Christina Warren and Alex Fitzpatrick come to mind immediately), but the site's original model—which was effectively a pitch to the masses of "Web 2.0 is awesome, don't you agree?"—had a certain charm to it that got lost when it decided its competition was BuzzFeed.
Certainly Mashable is no longer that kind of blog anymore, but this is sort of the death knell of the big Web 2.0 blog—a list that includes sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Barring The Next Web (which I believe is still owned by its original team), the ones that are still with us (like TechCrunch and now Mashable) are largely conglomerate-owned.
Unfortunate that Cashmore put all that work into the site only to basically break even.