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Axios Sells for $525M
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/GyLbL https://archive.ph/GyLbL
- henning 4y agoThe news site, not the JavaScript package.
- Invictus0 4y agoWeird to phrase it as "Axios agrees to sell itself" rather than "Cox buys Axios"; I guess NYT thinks no one has heard of Cox.
- smt88 4y agoI actually don't think it's common knowledge that Cox is a conglomerate with multiple unrelated businesses. Most people would know them as their ISP, and that's not even necessarily a huge portion of the country.
- Kye 4y agoThis is honestly the first I've heard they're more than a cable company.
- rjbwork 4y agoRIP. Was good while it lasted.
- e-master 4y agoI really liked it at first, especially when I was able to just expand the news item with a single click. Then they changed the UI so that you had to open a new page for each item and it basically ruined it for me, after that I pretty much stopped reading them.
- driggs 4y agoAxios on Axios: https://www.axios.com/2022/08/08/axios-agrees-to-sell-to-cox-enterprises-for-525-million https://www.axios.com/2022/08/08/axios-agrees-to-sell-to-cox...
- freediver 4y agoRefreshing to see this much transparency.
- TheGoodBarn 4y ago
- i386 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NotTameAntelope 4y ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.[0] Approximately 2007 (the year HN was created). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- i386 4y agoCool burner
- NotTameAntelope 4y agoYou actually joined HN less than a month before I did, FWIW. You should know better!
- i386 4y ago
- NotTameAntelope 4y ago
- arcticfox 4y ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- keepquestioning 4y agoVery interesting. No one talks about news startups, but there's endless talk about SaaS startups doing glorified log parsing. Another one to watch is Semafor.
- rchaud 4y agoThere's been plenty of discussion here about Vice, Buzzfeed, Substack and all the other 'new media' startups.
- bpodgursky 4y agoWell, for better or for worse, $500mm wouldn't even be worth mentioning as a tech exit (unless it came as a fire sale after a unicorn fundraising round).
- criddell 4y agoJust a few years ago, Bezos bought the Post for half that. I don't understand how any of this stuff is valued.
- mbreese 4y agoThe Axios newsletter first model is pretty good. They have direct access to subscribers without the baggage of actually printing anything. They’ve also done a good job of matching news content to attention spans. You get bullet points for the news with the ability to followup on what you want. It does mean that it’s not as good for long-form journalism, but that’s not where the market is headed (for better or worse). One of the other areas where Axios was moving (and where I think the valuation is coming from) is that they have expanded their DC insider model to more local sources. In an era where local news is struggling, having a setup for high quality local news without the overhead of a physical paper is great.
- esel2k 4y agoIs the reason for the value based the good usability, the user base or the content that is existing? I wonder as I am leading a content platform and was asked to think if we should sell it, but totally inexperienced in this.
- peytoncasper 4y agoI'd be interested in others take. However, I have to believe there are really only a few things that matter in deals like this. 1. Existing user base 2. Subscription price 3. Churn rate 4. Growth rate Maybe the content ranks somewhere in there, but I doubt it. Primarily, because objectively you should be able to judge the content based on the metrics above.
- smitty1110 4y agoThe user base is the value. Every staffer on the shill, in the West Wing, on K street and Embassy row, and every non profit in D.C. is a subscriber. It’s the same reason Axel Springer bought Politico ostensibly for the Playbook newsletters, it’s all about influence with power.
- rickstanley 4y agoI hope they don't change the way Axios is structured today. No overwhelming ads, simple layout, fast reading texts, good summary, etc. I used it as a "role model" for a local news website that I built in 2018. Took inspiration from Axios and tagesschau (https://tagesschau.de https://tagesschau.de).
- rchaud 4y agoSomeone just spent big money on it, and they're going to want to make that back. Advertising is the obvious way, so enjoy current Axios while you can.
- Barrin92 4y ago>and tagesschau for English speakers there's https://www.dw.com https://www.dw.com as well which explicitly writes for an international audience.
- brainzap 4y agopeople are just gonna switch to native fetch
- qualudeheart 4y agoCan we get a quick rundown on native fetch?
- pphysch 4y ago
- stingraycharles 4y agoNot saying you’re wrong, but it would help if you provided some source of what you believe is all this heinous misinformation.
- humanistbot 4y agoThe most heinous misinformation you've EVER SEEN? That's a pretty big claim, unless you're just prone to hyperbole.
- pphysch 4y agoYeah. It's especially heinous because they released it alongside a cherry-picked subset of "smoking gun" leaked docs that actually discredit their a priori conclusions. They're saying "we know our readers are too gullible to check our claims".
- humanistbot 4y agoYou still haven't said what example from Axios you meant. But compare it to Alex Jones' and Infowars' claims that the shooting at Sandy Hook was a staged false flag operation and the parents of dead kids were crisis actors. Texts from the trial show that they knew what they were doing. If you aren't familiar with this case, you might want to take a look at it and see how it ranks in terms of heinousness.
- pphysch 4y agoYes I have, please look at the rest of the thread you are replying to. Alex Jones harassed and defamed several people, very seriously. Axios is participating in an economic destruction campaign against millions of Muslims. Not really comparable.
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- didibus 4y agoDangit, I really liked Axios, and I worry the quality will go down afte this. Wished they'd remain independent.
- upupandup 4y agothought this was the npm axios lib and thinking why it would cost that much
- monkpit 4y agoI always wonder if they are related or not?
- afavour 4y agoI don’t see the value Axios provides, personally. It’s another Politico, made by Politico alums. Good for them that they get rich I guess but I can’t say I feel richer for Axios existing.
- elicash 4y agoI'd imagine they provide access to an even higher income audience. So, bigger CPMs for investors, for example.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoPolitico aint got s..t on this https://www.axios.com/2022/08/08/trump-toilet-photos-maggie-haberman https://www.axios.com/2022/08/08/trump-toilet-photos-maggie-...
- threatofrain 4y agoPolitico and The Hill are focused on Washington-relevant gossip. Axios is general news coverage in bullet points and not just for policy wonks. They also had high profile live interviews.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- symlinkk 4y agoWhat are they paying for here? The Axios “brand” is not well known enough to justify that much money. The “tech” is your standard CMS, anyone can build that. The “talent” is just average writers, in fact I can’t name a single one. How is this worth half a billion?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stagger87 4y agoAds
- missedthecue 4y ago2.4 million subscribers according to a Google search. Anyone can build a simple news site and hire journalists. Can anyone get that many readers?
- rchaud 4y agoHow many of those are engaged subscribers? If you subscribe in January, but haven't opened an email since March, you are still counted in subscriber rolls. But you are unlikely to be monetizable.
- 55555 4y agoAnyone can get that many subscribers by spending a fraction of 500mm USD on ads.
- manquer 4y agoEven if you did get "subscribers", monetizing subscribers is hard. Currently Axios generates $100M in revenue a year.
- Alupis 4y ago> 2.4 million subscribers according to a Google search Which is on par with a moderately successful YouTube channel - which likely has far more reach than Axios.
- snowwrestler 4y ago> Cox Enterprises is not buying out HQ, which Axios is spinning out into a separate company. Mr. Schwartz will be chief executive of that company and Cox will take a minority stake, with Mr. VandeHei serving as chairman, one of the people with knowledge of the deal said. Interesting. HQ probably has more upside than the media business long-term. Think Grammarly crossed with Mailchimp.
- esel2k 4y agoLooking at a previous article on NYT at the comments section there are alot of people not really wanting to read axios: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/business/media/axios-local.html#commentsContainer https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/business/media/axios-loca... Not wanting personalization algorithms or not liking bullet points. Overhere at HN the commenters are very positive. Anyone has an idea if this based on demographics or interests that there is such a discrepancy?
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- rchaud 4y agoOver here at HN, users would burn the NYT in effigy if they could, for no other reason because they force you to call them to cancel your subscription. BTW, I have successfully unsubscribed by just paying w/ Paypal and disabling the automatic payment from the Paypal UI. No, I don't live in CA and do not have any unsub-friendly laws applicable to me.
- Someone1234 4y agoCongrats on working around their dark-patterns, but that doesn't mean their dark-pattern business model isn't deserving of critique and warning others to avoid.
- rchaud 4y agoHow would others avoid them? This is standard practice for every major newspaper.
- esel2k 4y agoThanks for enlightening me. I live in Europe and just rarely get a NYT article recommended. I was curious to see axios beeing successful in such a different media business, also on how they focus on the local news.
- samarthr1 4y agoFor whatever reason, until I started reading the article, the first thing that came to my mind was "why did axios (the http library) sell?"
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoI won't lie, I'd sell an HTTP library for half a billion and change.
- redanddead 4y agobut then it wouldn't be much of a library anymore right? people buy in and work on open source projects because they're open source. that's the only reason I contribute to projects, because it's for the community I know of a few projects that are closed source but on npm, one of which is syncfusion, they make frontend components, I only found them when I was searching for a tree map component. But then I found echarts's tree map component by Apache, and it was like a completely next level compared to syncfusion, was 10x easier to integrate and had 1 million times more users it felt like. The github repo was like night and day in activity
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago> but then it wouldn't be much of a library anymore right? For that much money, I could start a foundation and fund a lot of new libraries if I wanted. I'd sell out for that. Not being much of a library is a problem for the new guys. And, if the new owners screw the pooch, the inevitable Librixos fork would probably just take over anyway.
- adamrezich 4y agowhen I worked at a web development company a few years back, they used axios (http library) and I just assumed it was related to Axios (website), like it was made for the website's use and open-sourced. I honestly had no idea they were wholly unrelated.
- redanddead 4y ago
- spywaregorilla 4y agoI don't have any particular thoughts on Axios' credibility, but I love their presentation style. It's really the news style guide that I always wanted
- rchaud 4y agoDon't get too used to it. The ads and upsells are about to increase 10 fold now that they've been acquired.
- personjerry 4y agoReally interesting to me. I built an AI news summarization service around three years ago and discovered Axios as a potential competitor. At the time they were still defining themselves; I still have a (no longer functional) TestPilot version of their app on my phone. With the polish of their services and the big money behind them, they seemed like an obvious win. It felt like they understood the same thing I did - Bottom Line Up Front is the key to capturing the next generation of young professionals reading the news. But it's interesting to see that they've sold at less than a billion dollars - it seems like their experiments were running out of steam, and it makes sense too with the tech industry downturn that they must be facing pressure to cash out.
- jgalt212 4y agoReorg Research has been targeting 3X this amount. https://newspub.live/news/warburg-backed-news-group-reorg-research-hires-bankers-for-sale/ https://newspub.live/news/warburg-backed-news-group-reorg-re...
- guywithahat 4y agoAnother article not behind a paywall https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/axios-sold-to-cox-enterprises-for-reported-525m/ https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/axios-sold-to-cox-enterprises-... And the WSJ's take on it, which is behind a paywall but is probably the best one I've seen https://www.wsj.com/articles/axios-to-be-acquired-by-cox-enterprises-for-525-million-11659969645 https://www.wsj.com/articles/axios-to-be-acquired-by-cox-ent...
- grej 4y agoAxios had serious reporting in many areas, and managed to build a following without resorting to clickbait. They managed a great exit for a media company. They are the anti-buzzfeed. Hopefully this inspires more of the same.
- gaws 4y ago> managed to build a following without resorting to clickbait Jonathan Swan's reporting during the Trump era and Sara Fischer's coverage of the media and Big Tech kept Axios relevant. No doubt bigger organizations like The New York Times, CNN, or The Washington Post tried to poach them. I'd love to know how much the company is paying to keep them from leaving.