Producing great content doesn’t always lead to a great outcome.
Two of early 2010’s media darlings, BuzzFeed and Vox Media, were bright spots in the audience era. They focused on scale. And even though they competed against social media platforms and the tens of thousands of long-tail sites hooked up to SSPs, they seemed like they would make it.
But this spring, those two companies entered new chapters. Last week, Vox Media was acquired by James Murdoch at a $300 million dollar valuation. Byron Allen closed his acquisition of BuzzFeed this week– for a mere $20 million in cash followed by $100 million in five years. Vox and BuzzFeed have been struggling and looking for buyers, and sometimes many. (Vox only sold part of its business). The modest transaction prices, a fraction of the companies’ one-time valuations, reflect the shifting sands of media in the age of AI.
Pirating persists
How did you watch the latest NFL game? Or stream your sports? While many of us subscribe to streaming services or watch on linear, there are millions of people who watch pirated streams of content mirrored off of other devices.
AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher, who covered an Adalytics report documenting the scope of these pirated streams, talks about how this behavior affects different constituents in the TV space: the advertisers, the programmers, the viewers and the measurement companies.
On the advertising side, in some sense many advertisers get “free” ads shown to this undercounted audience. But there’s also the possibility that bespoke, tailored programmatic ads could be mirrored to thousands of viewers.
In a TV environment where advertisers are exacting performance and programmers need every streaming subscription they can muster, should piracy be met with a shrug or a concerted effort to plug the hole?