Mashable: $46M raised[0], 15M MAU[1] and $35-40M p.a in revenue[2] (sold for $50M)
Business Insider: $55M raised, 76M MAU, $50M+ rev (sold at $442M[5])
Refinery29: $125M raised, 27M MAU, $100M+ rev
Vox: $307M raised[4], 170M MAU, $100M+ rev
Buzzfeed: $496M raised, 200M+ MAU, $280-300M rev (was $350M - updated thanks)
HuffPo: $37M raised, 126M MAU, $30M+ rev (sold for $316M)
TechCrunch: $0 raised, 5M+ MAU, ? rev (sold for $25-30M)
Medium: $132M raised, 60M+ MAU, ? rev
Cracked: $0 raised, 10M+ MAU, $12M+ rev (sold for $39M[6])
Margins and growth are the diff between selling for 1.5x revenue and 10x revenue[7] - clearly a few models, where you either raise a little and do well with low headcount and organic audience, or raise $40M+ and set an expectation of getting near 100M MAU with $40M+ p.a revenue with high margins (~50%) and growth
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mashable
[1] https://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/MashableMediaKit.pdf
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mashable-could-be-for-sal...
[3] http://adage.com/article/media/private-equity-plowing-money-...
[4] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vox-media
[5] http://fortune.com/2015/09/29/business-insider-axel-springer...
[6] https://www.recode.net/2016/4/12/11586060/cracked-demand-med...
[7] https://www.poynter.org/news/how-much-digital-media-company-...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzzfeed-set-to-miss-revenue-ta...
It seemed a weird move even at the time. Why would you want to build a business that's contingent upon catching the zeitgeist in a bottle? That's so incredibly hard.
What you are feeling and seeing is that the media is turned into a hyper-partisan machine where any issue discussed is in the context of extremes. It drives emotion, creates and drives viral content, and drives revenue. However, it doesn't produce substantive content one would find meaningful. It doesn't pay.
Techcrunch is 281 US, 632 world, Mashable is 364 US, 855 world.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/techcrunch.com https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mashable.com
But the buyout is sad to me because, if you break it down, it was a really great example of technology blog getting launched by a guy in his bedroom and that guy finding major success with it. There was a time that Mashable was so prominent in the social sphere that a new article of theirs could trend on Twitter just because of the source.
Certainly, the company's never gone away (and it's produced some pretty amazing alums in the journalism world, it should be said—Christina Warren and Alex Fitzpatrick come to mind immediately), but the site's original model—which was effectively a pitch to the masses of "Web 2.0 is awesome, don't you agree?"—had a certain charm to it that got lost when it decided its competition was BuzzFeed.
Certainly Mashable is no longer that kind of blog anymore, but this is sort of the death knell of the big Web 2.0 blog—a list that includes sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. Barring The Next Web (which I believe is still owned by its original team), the ones that are still with us (like TechCrunch and now Mashable) are largely conglomerate-owned.
Unfortunate that Cashmore put all that work into the site only to basically break even.
Sites like Pando and The Information really fit in a different category—they're built less around aggregation like Mashable and company were upon launch, and more on original reporting.
That inspired me to comment on their AOL page that I thought they gushed too much and I mentioned that after reading it I had to wonder if they owned stock in Netscape. One their representatives came on and trashed me for insinuating such a thing and then their fan club piled on me and just reamed me over my comments but the very next month they had yet another article about it and this one began with a disclaimer saying they did own stock in Netscape.
That was it for me. I never bought another issue of it or anything else they published.
A friend of mine and I did this http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/pinview-facebook-pinterest-ap...
and they picked it up which then started a whole slew of other magazine picking it up.
It was one of the reasons I could get an O visa as it gave me exposure in a lot of international magainze.
Anway sad to see them sell for a while it was one of my favorite online blogs.
