But for the right buyer, their brands and intellectual property could be attractive assets. Similar to the dynamic that unfolded at G/O Media, the individual titles could be sold to strategic fits or private equity players.
Capital One has already kicked the tires on Eater, per Puck, and Vox Media has been shopping The Dodo for the last year, according to a person familiar with the process. Unless PMC has interest in more than Popsugar, the remaining brands will more than likely be parceled out in this fashion.
One key revenue executive at Vox Media, chief revenue officer Geoff Schiller, is also set to leave the company.
Schiller did not respond to a request for comment.
The revenue leader, who boomeranged back to Vox Media following an earlier stint at Group Nine, is planning to depart June 5, according to people familiar with the matter. His departure suggests that Remain Co. is not an attractive long-term destination for the career-minded.
And who can blame him? With his $300 million acquisition of New York Magazine, the VMPN, and Vox, Murdoch made off with the crown jewels of the Vox Media empire, the fastest-growing and most prestigious components of a portfolio that had otherwise grown stagnant.
The remaining titles, unlike when NBCU spun off Versant, are neither particularly lucrative nor especially attractive. They do not throw off cash and are rooted quite firmly to the open web, which itself is cratering due to the disruption posed by artificial intelligence.
The Murdoch spinoff is a happy coda to a decades-long digital media saga, one that ensures that the namesake Vox brand, the iconic New York Magazine, and the ascendent Vox podcast network will live on. The rest of the portfolio, though, will have to find its own way.
Talking Heds
Amazon Bomb (SCOOP): Over the past few months, Amazon has been quietly restructuring its affiliate program, cutting the commission rates it pays publishers up to 50% in some instances, according to seven publishers and partners with direct knowledge of the changes. The cuts came as the result of a directive from Amazon to trim 20% of its costs from the sector, a pullback prompted by a multitude of reasons, including a strategic shift to focus on creator affiliate and the need to free up cash to fund AI investments. Between Google’s AI overviews collapsing organic traffic at the top of the funnel and Amazon paying less at the bottom, the business of converting organic search into affiliate revenue has become super challenging, one source told me.
Growing Pengs: Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced in an internal memo on Wednesday that she was stepping down from the role after about two and a half years. Replacing her on an interim basis will be Christian Baesler, a deputy at parent company Axel Springer. The resignation comes just days after yet another round of layoffs at Business Insider, the latest death rattle from a brand increasingly seen as in terminal decline. The news outlet, where I and half of the New York media industry once worked, has sought to retrench around core areas of coverage, but such downsizing often makes more sense on whiteboards than it does to consumers.
