While these four brands represent the premium arm of the Vox Media portfolio, the remaining dot-com assets of Vox, The Dodo, Popsugar, and Thrilist make up its value division.
Vox, although the namesake of the company, has struggled to keep pace with its legacy peers.
Its news orientation and historical dependence on social traffic have proven to be commercial headwinds, according to two people familiar with the company. To compensate, it has pivoted its content strategy, launching a paywall and expanding its newsletter offerings in a bid to capitalize on its brand equity. In the Vox Media hierarchy, it now falls somewhere between the premium set and the Group Nine assets.
In hindsight, Vox Media’s purchase of Group Nine marked a severe misstep, according to all five people. The tie-up occurred at the peak of the pandemic bubble, meaning Vox Media traded its stock for a group of editorial assets whose traffic soon cratered.
In doing so, it brought over the brands Thrillist, The Dodo, NowThis, and Popsugar, all of which have dropped precipitously in value since the tie-up. Since joining Vox Media, Thrillist has been folded into Eater and Popsugar has endured a series of rebrands.
“The Group Nine acquisition didn’t work out the way that anyone wanted it to,” said one source.
As standalone titles, the former Group Nine titles will likely be difficult to sell. But Vox Media has had success in rehoming some of its smaller brands.
In 2023, it spun NowThis off into nonprofit ownership, and in 2024, it sold the gaming brand Polygon to Valnet for around $20 million, according to two people familiar with the deal, the details of which have not been previously reported.
What Vox Media built over a decade took dozens of deals to assemble. Taking it apart, it turns out, may take nearly as many.
Talking Heds
Microsoft, Macro Payments (EXCLUSIVE): The new content marketplace offering from Microsoft, through which the company pays participating publishers for using their content to populate its Copilot answers, has already paid out around $10 million since its launch late last year, according to Tim Frank, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI monetization. The sum might be small, but it is still significant—after all, I have written far more about far smaller such payments in the past. Microsoft is betting that, in paying for premium inputs, its answer engine will yield premium outputs, thus differentiating it from answer engines scraping the open web indiscriminately. So far, according to Frank, the early results support that hypothesis—news that publishers, no doubt, are thrilled to hear.
Le Sub: Substack has gone global. The platform now counts more than 30,000 creators outside the U.S., and its European contingent alone is earning more than $90 million annually, according to data the company released on Wednesday. In total, more than 100,000 creators globally are earning money on the platform. As artificial intelligence continues to overwhelm both the open internet and social platforms with synthetic content, the 5 million paying subscribers on Substack only grow more appealing. Forget David Ellison buying The Free Press—how long until someone buys Substack itself?
OnlyFans’ Fans (EXCLUSIVE): On Thursday, a former member of the OnlyFans founding team, R.J. Phillips, is launching a new social platform called Zoop. The company aims to challenge OnlyFans, with a model that similarly enables creators to paywall their content. As fate would have it, the launch marks the second such product to launch from a former OnlyFans executive this month. Last week, OnlyFans former chief executive Ami Gan unveiled Vylit, which functions similarly to the adult platform except with added AI controls. What is it about OnlyFans that makes former staff feel so certain they can improve upon it? If history is any indication, sometimes being first is better than being the best.
