What Is Vox Media? We Explain Here
The headquarters of the American media firm Vox Media are in New York City and Washington, D.C. Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett started the company in November 2011 to include The Verge and SB Nation, a sports blog network founded in 2005 by Tyler Bleszinski, Markos Moulitsas, and Jerome Armstrong. Since 2009, Bankoff has served as the CEO of SB Nation.
Editorial brands owned by Vox Media include The Verge, Vox, SB Nation, Eater, Polygon, and New York. The websites Intelligencer, The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street are all included under New York. The foundations of Vox Media’s brands are Chorus, a custom content management system, and Concert, an advertising marketplace. Chorus, Concert, Vox Creative, Vox Entertainment, Vox Media Studios, and the Vox Media Podcast Network are only a few of the company’s business divisions. 2020 will see the opening of new offices for the business in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, and London. The network featured more than 300 blogs with more than 400 paid authors in June 2010.
Blogads network
As a sports blog covering the baseball team Oakland Athletics from a fan’s perspective, Tyler Bleszinski, a freelance writer, founded Athletics Nation in 2003. After Daily Kos, the blog swiftly overtook other sites on the Blogads network in popularity.
He expressed interest in SB Nation’s objective of creating a network of sports-specific websites. The SB Nation network featured 185 blogs by February 2009, and in November 2010, Comscore calculated that the site had 5.8 million unique users. The fastest-growing sports website the business was tracking at the time was SB Nation, which saw a 208% rise in unique visits from November 2009 to that month.
In order to create a new technology-focused website in the same network as SB Nation, Bankoff hired a number of former writers from AOL’s technology blog Engadget, including the former editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky. These writers had initially left AOL due to disagreements between Topolsky and Michael Arrington, the creator of TechCrunch, as well as the disclosure of an internal training manual that outlined a content strategy for AOL’s blogs that prioritised profitability.
Given their similar demographics, Bankoff believed that a technology-focused website would complement SB Nation. Topolsky served as editor-in-chief when The Verge first went live on November 1, 2011.
Growth equity firm
In December 2014, General Atlantic, a growth equity firm, led a US$46.5 million round of funding for Vox Media, valuing the media company at about $380 million. Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, and Khosla Ventures have all invested in Vox Media’s earlier rounds. Allen & Company, Providence Equity Partners, and a number of angel investors, such as Ted Leonsis, Dan Rosensweig, Jeff Weiner, and Brent Jones, are other funders. The company raised an additional $40 million in a Series D that valued it at over $200 million.
Fast Company recognised Vox Media as one of the “most inventive” media firms in the world in 2017 for “doubling down on quality content while growing.” Additionally, Washingtonian magazine named Vox Media one of the “50 Great Places to Work” in Washington, D.C. On the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which measures companies on how they treat LGBT employees, the corporation received a score of 95 out of 100.