Mashable has been hit with what appears to be a significant round of layoffs, following the struggling digital-media company’s fire sale to Ziff Davis.…
Mashable has been hit with what appears to be a significant round of layoffs, following the struggling digital-media company’s fire sale to Ziff Davis.
Mashable ’s deal to sell to publisher Ziff Davis for $50 million — one-fifth of its prior valuation of $250 million — was reported last month by the Wall Street Journal. The exit for Mashable came after it sought additional funding to keep the doors open.
On Tuesday, New York-based Mashable closed the deal and with the sale to Ziff Davis, which is owned by tech-services company j2 Global, has laid off 50 employees, Recode reported. It’s unclear how many total employees Mashable has.
Mashable and j2 reps did not respond to requests for comment.
Pete Cashmore is staying on at Mashable under Ziff Davis’ ownership, according to the Recode report.
Cashmore announced the layoffs in a memo to staff Tuesday. “It is never easy to see colleagues and friends depart the company. While such decisions are difficult and painful, I can assure you they were made only after very careful consideration and based on what we firmly believe will provide Mashable with a strategy and structure that will drive a successful, sustainable and profitable future,” he wrote in the memo, as reported by Recode.
Several Mashable staffers tweeted about getting laid off from the company on Tuesday:
Investors in Mashable included Time Warner’s Turner, which led a $15 million round of funding last year, as well as Time Warner Investments, Updata Partners, David Jones and Mike Lazerow, and R&R Venture Partners, a fund created by Dick Parsons and Ronald Lauder.
Cashmore founded Mashable as a blog in 2005 when he was a teen in Scotland. In the last two years it has seen an exodus of top execs including chief strategy officer Adam Ostrow, who departed for TV broadcaster Tegna, and chief revenue officer Ed Wise (now CRO of Romeo Power). Mashable laid off about 30 employees last year after the Series C funding, including longtime editor-in-chief Jim Roberts and previous CRO Seth Rogin.
In 2016, Mashable recorded a net loss of $10 million as revenue rose 36% to $42 million, according to the Journal. The company had been targeting $50 million in revenue for 2017 and appeared to be on track for a sizable loss, per the WSJ.
For the third quarter of 2017, Ziff Davis (reported as the digital media group of j2) generated revenue of $127.8 million and an adjusted operating profit of $34.7 million.
Ziff Davis’s properties include IGN, PCMag, AskMen, Speedtest, ExtremeTech, and Everyday Health. The New York-based publisher was acquired in 2012 by j2, whose business cloud services group offers services like internet fax, virtual phone, and email marketing.
