Vox Media acquires Group Nine

Two transactions in two weeks. Four digital media companies are now becoming two. Get ready for more.

This is news on Monday that my employer Vox Media is about to acquire Group Nine, which is the publisher behind media such as The Dodo and Now This.The transaction announcement was first made in Wall Street Journal A few days after BuzzFeed completed its acquisition of Complex Networks, a company-wide email confirmed that the publisher’s target customers were people who like hip-hop and sneakers.

The BuzzFeed-Complex transaction is BuzzFeed goes public, Its CEO Jonah Peretti (Jonah Peretti) said he wants to take this move because it will help him acquire more media companies. Today’s transaction shows that the acquisition of a media company does not necessarily require a public listing: Vox is privately owned, and so is Group Nine.

But the mechanics of transactions—we can discuss some of them in a minute—are less important than the big picture: in general, men and women who run digital media companies have been talking about merging with each other for some time. An optimistic version of the promotion: Combination means greater scope, higher efficiency, and more excitement. the other side: If we don’t unite, we may not succeed.

Now, mashups are happening in some way.

For example, BuzzFeed has acquired HuffPost, a digital publisher that Peretti co-founded with others before starting his own company; he and Ninth Group CEO Ben Lehr had previously discussed merging the two companies.Two years ago, Vox Media acquired New York Magazine and regularly acquires small media companies—for example, last month, it acquired a podcast studio Criminal productionNancy Dubuc, CEO of Vice Media, who acquired Refinery 29 in 2019, also made it clear that She thinks her industry should be integratedDotdash, the digital publishing arm of Barry Diller’s IAC, has just swallowed magazine publisher Meredith and its library of books, including many books formerly known as Time Inc.

Hopefully not: The Athletic, a subscription-supported sports site, has been looking for buyers for a while, but it couldn’t find buyers willing to pay the required price. Axios, a newsletter publisher founded by Politico veterans, was in talks with German publisher Axel Springer before the deal failed.

The Ninth Group itself also wants to acquire other companies.At the beginning of this year, it created Blank Check SPAC Company — BuzzFeed uses the same mechanism for listing and buying Complex. Today’s news seems to admit that Jiu Group cannot find the company it wants to acquire, or the company it wants to be acquired. (Now the ownership of Group Nine in the SPAC will be transferred to Vox Media, and then Vox Media can use it to do…some things.)

At the core of all these deals-real and proposed-is scale: the scale is large enough for the reason that it can more easily sell ads or subscriptions, or both. At this point, you should mention the imminent digital media duopoly of Google and Facebook, and consider integration as an antidote. But it needs to be clear: not all of these companies will become actual competitors of Google or Facebook after the merger; it is just that having more audiences can more easily attract more advertising revenue, or for subscription-based companies, more Big companies have more things to sell.

So if integration helps these publishers survive, then… okay? Yes, merging publishers means that some of your favorite titles and brands may merge and no longer exist. But I hope that more people can survive in this way, rather than survive on their own.

In terms of today’s details: This is an all-stock transaction, which means that Group Nine investors-including the cable developer Discovery that is trying to acquire Warner Media-will eventually get a 25% stake in Vox Media. At the same time, Vox Media has received investment funds from Comcast. Therefore, the two largest media companies in the world may eventually hold shares in the same digital media business-although I’m not sure any of them cares about this very much.

Although Vox Media’s CEO Jim Bankoff told us in a company email today that he “has no immediate plans to go public,” this was a transaction made as a precursor to the listing: The Wall Street Journal reported that Vox Media, if The successful acquisition will achieve revenue of 700 million U.S. dollars and profit of 100 million U.S. dollars next year; BuzzFeed is predicting similar numbers for itself.

In addition to the huge volume, the company hopes to start the final publicity to investors as soon as possible: We have something for everyoneI investigated some of Vox’s competitors today and heard a lot of nonsense about the company’s upcoming assets: “You are buying a pet website,” an executive sneered.But if people want to buy ads on it Pet website, And the income from that pet website helps me keep working, so I won’t complain.