World of Good Brands Sells Off Portfolio, Lays Off Staff, and Shutters 

Digital media company World of Good Brands has sold off its three remaining properties—Well+Good, Livestrong, and Only In Your State—and shuttered, according to four people familiar with the situation.

The bulk of the staff, excluding some team members who moved with the respective brands, were laid off.

A spokesperson for its parent company, Graham Holdings, confirmed the closures. The company declined to share how many people were affected by the layoffs, though between 50 and 200 people worked at World of Good Brands, according to LinkedIn.

“After a brief transition of services period, World of Good Brands will no longer be a unit of Graham Holdings,” said Sandy Stonesifer, vice president and chief human resources officer at Graham Holdings. “We wish all of the brands well in their new homes.”

The digital media company Ziff Davis acquired the editorial brands Well+Good and Livestrong on June 6. Ziff Davis, which is publicly owned, issued a statement last week containing the news. 

Its purchase of Livestrong includes only its content assets, which will be redirected to brands within its Everyday Health portfolio, according to a person familiar with the deal. As a result, there will no longer be a Livestrong content website.

Terms of the deals were not disclosed, outside of a note that the price of the Well+Good acquisition was “not material” to the Ziff Davis business.

Graham Holdings sold the other title in its World of Good Brands portfolio, Only In Your State, to digital media company Launch Potato in June. The terms of that deal were also not disclosed.

“Launch Potato is excited to integrate Only In Your State into its portfolio of brands,” said founder Greg Van Horn.

Ziff Davis expands, Graham Holdings contracts

The acquisitions mark the latest in a period of heightened dealmaking for Ziff Davis, which acquired CNET in October and theSkimm in March.

The closure of World of Good Brands marks the end of a long, tumultuous saga for the company, which was originally conceived as Demand Media in 2006.

The company went public in 2011 after pioneering a method of editorial production now referred to pejoratively as content farming. Its tactics spurred Google to issue an algorithm update at the time to curtail the practice, effectively setting off the cat-and-mouse tactic of algorithmic gaming that would define search engine optimization strategies for the next decade. 

Demand Media rebranded to Leaf Group in 2016, and it was acquired by Graham Holdings for $323 million in 2021. Graham Holdings, which also owns Slate and Foreign Policy, owned The Washington Post for 80 years before selling it to Jeff Bezos in 2013.

The acquisition aged poorly, as ADWEEK exclusively reported at the time. In 2022, Graham Holdings chief executive and president Timothy O’Shaughnessy admitted as much in his shareholder letter.

“In short, Leaf has underperformed our expectations and we overpaid,” O’Shaughnessy wrote. “I screwed this one up.”

Graham Holdings restructured Leaf Group in 2023, splitting it into a marketplace business and a lifestyle publishing business. 

Leaf Group chief revenue officer Lindsey Abramo became the CEO of the lifestyle publishing division, which was rebranded to World of Good Brands. The division contained four brands at the time: Well+Good, Only In Your State, Livestrong, and Hunker, which generated about 37.5 million monthly unique visitors, according to Axios.

But the media properties continued to struggle, and in December 2023 the staff of Hunker was laid off and the title was later sold to Static Media for an undisclosed price in 2024. 

In May, Abramo spoke with ADWEEK about her plans to revitalize the remainder of the World of Good portfolio, infusing the Only In Your State website with artificial intelligence and launching an experiential showroom for Well+Good. But by June, Graham Holdings sold off the remaining three brands.

The dissolution of the World of Good Brands portfolio mirrors the recent unraveling of G/O Media, which also sold off its editorial division in parts and closed its doors in July. 

The twin closures comes at a fittingly symbolic moment. As AI reshapes the search landscape, the companies that epitomized its previous era are disappearing along with it.