Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis

Mashable to Sell to Ziff Davis(techcrunch.com)

50 points by Mrtierne 8 years ago | 19 comments

nikcub 8 years ago |

Comparisons:

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-...

adventured 8 years ago | |

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...

replicatorblog 8 years ago | |

Interesting side note, Michael Arrington made more on the sale of TechCrunch than Arianna Huffington did on the sale of HuffPo. The power of capital efficiency!

cagenut 8 years ago | |

UV != MAU

jamestimmins 8 years ago |

Back 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.

jenga22 8 years ago | |

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.

nsp 8 years ago | | |

Are you sure? I know there are better sources than alexa, but its usually fairly accurate for top 1000 sites.

Techcrunch is 281 US, 632 world, Mashable is 364 US, 855 world.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/techcrunch.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mashable.com

thisacctforreal 8 years ago | | |

A good example of wealth extraction vs wealth creation.

noitsnot 8 years ago | |

They recently started putting a good amount of affiliate products in-line with their other articles. Flat out deceptive titles leading you to believe they were reviews or viral content.

shortformblog 8 years ago |

Mashable, 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.

Carhughes 8 years ago | |

Well stated. I miss the old Mashable. Before it tried to compete with BuzzFeed, its readers were manic sharers of content. I wasn't fond of the new video direction it was going, rarely covering good tech news.

Apocryphon 8 years ago | |

How about Pando?

shortformblog 8 years ago | | |

It was founded after that era. (Though it's part of that lineage simply because it features a lot of former TechCrunchers.) All the sites I listed launched around 2005-2007, during the Web 2.0 years.

Sites like Pando and The Information really fit in a different category—they're built less around aggregation like Mashable and company were upon launch, and more on original reporting.

VonGuard 8 years ago |

Ex-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.

Mrtierne 8 years ago | |

TechTV! That goes way back and now I miss G4

mmanfrin 8 years ago | |

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.

oblib 8 years ago |

Years ago (mid-late `90s) I used to buy "MacWorld" magazine every month, which I enjoyed. Not long after the internet became a thing they did a "Best Web Browser" feature and gushed about "Netscape Navigator" to the point where I got suspicious because on the Mac it was truly awful. Not that there was anything better, but it was still crap.

That inspired me to comment on their AOL page that I thought they gushed too much and I mentioned that after reading it I had to wonder if they owned stock in Netscape. One their representatives came on and trashed me for insinuating such a thing and then their fan club piled on me and just reamed me over my comments but the very next month they had yet another article about it and this one began with a disclaimer saying they did own stock in Netscape.

That was it for me. I never bought another issue of it or anything else they published.

ThomPete 8 years ago |

I owe a lot to mashable.

A friend of mine and I did this http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/pinview-facebook-pinterest-ap...

and they picked it up which then started a whole slew of other magazine picking it up.

It was one of the reasons I could get an O visa as it gave me exposure in a lot of international magainze.

Anway sad to see them sell for a while it was one of my favorite online blogs.

ghostcluster 8 years ago |

Same parent company that recently bought Humble Bundle.