BuzzFeed bought Complex to help it go public; Vox Media may be thinking along the same lines.
Two weeks, two deals. And now four digital media companies are turning into two. Get ready for more of that. That’s the takeaway from Monday’s news that Vox Media — my employer — is close to acquiring Group Nine, the publisher behind outlets like The Dodo and Now This. That deal announcement, first reported in the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed via a companywide email shortly after, comes days after BuzzFeed finished up buying Complex Networks, the publisher aimed at dudes who like hip-hop and sneakers. The BuzzFeed-Complex deal came as BuzzFeed went public, a move its CEO Jonah Peretti said he wanted to make because it would help him acquire more media companies. Today’s deal shows that you don’t have to be public to buy a media company: Vox is private, and so is Group Nine. But the mechanics of the deal — we can talk about some of those in a minute — are less important than the big picture: Collectively, the men and women who run digital media companies have been talking about combining with each other for some time. The optimistic version of that pitch: Combining equals more reach, more efficiency, more awesomeness. The flip side: If we don’t combine, we may not make it. And now the mashups are happening, one way or another. BuzzFeed, for instance, had already acquired HuffPost, the digital publisher Peretti had co-founded before launching his own company; he and Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer had previously talked about combining their two companies. Two years ago, Vox Media bought New York Magazine, and has been periodically picking up small media companies — last month, for instance, it picked up podcast studio Criminal Productions.
