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Vox Media Acquires New York Magazine
- sprsimplestuff 7y agoIt'll be interesting to see where this goes. Vox Media has built up some really good brands and I'd hate to see this drag them down. Odd that they aren't folding related publications, as they're definitely going to have some competing internal publications until they do. Makes sense for the employees though, probably, to retain their own editorial style on each side of things
- joegahona 7y ago> “No one had to do this,” Pamela Wasserstein, the chief executive of New York Media, said on Tuesday. “It’s a brilliant, in our view, opportunity, so that’s why we leaned into it. It’s not out of need. It’s out of ambition.” If it was such a great opportunity and not out of need, why wouldn’t they disclose the value of the sale?
- tengbretson 7y ago> Neither company would disclose the value of the deal. I'm going to go ahead and assume this was less of a "buy" and more of a "took on their debt in exchange for their assets" kind of situation
- cagenut 7y agoBoth NYMag and Vox claim/seek to license their CMS to third parties to offset the sunk costs they've dumped into developing them. NYMag's is named "Clay" and counts golf.com and radio.com as customers: https://clay.nymag.com/ https://clay.nymag.com/ Vox's is called "Chorus" and they claim to have 350 sites but they don't care to name them: https://getchorus.voxmedia.com/ https://getchorus.voxmedia.com/ Both are getting absolutely creamed in the market by WaPo's ARC: https://www.arcpublishing.com/ https://www.arcpublishing.com/ (and of course Wordpress) So it stands to reason that at least one of these two CMS's is going to eat the other. Most likely Chorus eating Clay, vox's set of properties and traffic is 6-8x larger than nymag's (by comscore uniques) so its less work to keep it.
- joegahona 7y ago> Both are getting absolutely creamed in the market by WaPo’s ARC Do you have a source for this? Genuinely curious.
- cameronbrown 7y agoDoubtful. If Clay has commercial customers then there's every reason not to drop support.
- joegahona 7y agoWouldn't there be motive to move Clay's customers to Chorus, to cut down on engineering costs of supporting two entirely different CMSs?
- cameronbrown 7y agoThat sounds like an absolute nightmare of a migration.
- donohoe 7y agoDon’t be so sure that ARC is doing that well.
- basch 7y agoSlate runs on Clay. Does anyone else run on Business Insiders Viking? Gawker's Kinja was another big expensive play out of nearly the same playbook. Say Media has Tempest. https://www.cms-connected.com/News-Archive/February-2018/What-CMS-Providers-Learn-From-Media-Company-as-Tech-Companies https://www.cms-connected.com/News-Archive/February-2018/Wha... https://www.npgroup.net/blog/these-companies-use-a-custom-cms-and-so-should-you/ https://www.npgroup.net/blog/these-companies-use-a-custom-cm... https://digiday.com/media/publisher-cmss-got-names/ https://digiday.com/media/publisher-cmss-got-names/ Dotdash also has Atlas, now Helios. https://techblog.dotdash.com/the-evolution-of-dotdashs-publishing-stack-c4e1fe313734?source=---------0----------------------- https://techblog.dotdash.com/the-evolution-of-dotdashs-publi... And then there is Atex’s dm.Polopoly And a ton of other ones owned by the 5 big newspapers, Tribune, Hearst (MediaOS is available for licensing), Gannett, McClatchy, and GateHouse (New Media Investment Group). "A large majority of U.S. daily newspapers using TownNews.com’s BLOX CMS." https://www.acquia.com/blog/evolution-media-company-cms-platforms-newspaper-industry/28/01/2016/3291516 https://www.acquia.com/blog/evolution-media-company-cms-plat... https://www.acquia.com/blog/evolution-media-company-cms-platforms-newspaper-cms-selection/10/02/2016/3291791 https://www.acquia.com/blog/evolution-media-company-cms-plat... This market will consolidate one way or another, either by everyone settling on Arc, Wordpress, Chrous etc, by the tech companies gobbling up all the content companies, as customers or subsidiaries.
- goodluckchuck 7y agoIIRC there was a recent article about how VOX was running at a loss and being propped up by certain political actors. I’ll try to find it in the morning.
- bt848 7y agoIt’s wild that Vox is an amateur baseball blog that mushroomed into a billion-dollar media conglomerate.
- aaomidi 7y agoThrow back to when people were saying unionizing will kill vox.