Vox Media Acquires New York Magazine(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Vox Media Acquires New York Magazine
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/business/media/vox-buys-nymag.html
18 comments
Slate 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/Wha...
https://www.npgroup.net/blog/these-companies-use-a-custom-cm...
https://digiday.com/media/publisher-cmss-got-names/
Dotdash also has Atlas, now Helios. 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-plat...
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.
https://www.cms-connected.com/News-Archive/February-2018/Wha...
https://www.npgroup.net/blog/these-companies-use-a-custom-cm...
https://digiday.com/media/publisher-cmss-got-names/
Dotdash also has Atlas, now Helios. 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-plat...
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.
> Both are getting absolutely creamed in the market by WaPo’s ARC
Do you have a source for this? Genuinely curious.
Do you have a source for this? Genuinely curious.
Doubtful. If Clay has commercial customers then there's every reason not to drop support.
Wouldn't there be motive to move Clay's customers to Chorus, to cut down on engineering costs of supporting two entirely different CMSs?
That sounds like an absolute nightmare of a migration.
Vox's system is heavily used by sports sites, specifically by the SBNation.com system.
Don’t be so sure that ARC is doing that well.
> 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
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
> “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?
If it was such a great opportunity and not out of need, why wouldn’t they disclose the value of the sale?
It'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
Throw back to when people were saying unionizing will kill vox.
NYMag's is named "Clay" and counts golf.com and radio.com as customers: 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/
Both are getting absolutely creamed in the market by WaPo's ARC: 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.