*The ad thing didn't work out for publishing. Online, or off it. This feels like a set of maneuvers at the last gasp.
*I often wondered about the fate of the blog here. I always figured I'd outlive it... it's a wonder it's still around, really... but the end feels closer now.
*I wonder what media ten years from now looks like. When you can't imagine how things will change, it generally means that something unimaginable will happen.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/17/media/daily-beast-sale-digital-media-companies/index.html
(...)
Mashable, which was valued at $250 million early last year, has reportedly agreed to sell itself for just $50 million to the trade publisher Ziff Davis.
Univision is reportedly looking for investors to buy a minority stake in their Fusion Media Group, which includes the former Gawker Media sites and the Onion, as well as Fusion TV.
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is on track to miss its revenue targets by as much as 20% and is no longer likely to file for an initial public offering next year, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Vice, too, will fall short of its projected revenues.
Even CNN Digital, which brought in its highest revenue in history this year, expects to fall short of its revenue projections by at least $20 million dollars, according to BuzzFeed.
So, what happened?
In a number of cases, companies failed to meet the sky-high numbers they promised to investors. Some, like BuzzFeed and Mashable, scaled-up by being omnipresent on social media without figuring out how to make enough money off those platforms.
Meanwhile, those platforms – most notably Facebook and Google – started taking larger and larger chunks of the available advertising revenue. Today, the Facebook-Google duopoly owns between 60 to 70% of the U.S. digital ad market, leaving digital media companies to fight over crumbs.
