
Vox Media Acquires New York Magazine - sbuccini
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/business/media/vox-buys-nymag.html
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cagenut
Both NYMag and Vox claim/seek to license their CMS to third parties to offset
the sunk costs they've dumped into developing them.

NYMag's is named "Clay" and counts golf.com and radio.com as customers:
[https://clay.nymag.com/](https://clay.nymag.com/)

Vox's is called "Chorus" and they claim to have 350 sites but they don't care
to name them:
[https://getchorus.voxmedia.com/](https://getchorus.voxmedia.com/)

Both are getting absolutely creamed in the market by WaPo's ARC:
[https://www.arcpublishing.com/](https://www.arcpublishing.com/) (and of
course Wordpress)

So it stands to reason that at least one of these two CMS's is going to eat
the other. Most likely Chorus eating Clay, vox's set of properties and traffic
is 6-8x larger than nymag's (by comscore uniques) so its less work to keep it.

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cameronbrown
Doubtful. If Clay has commercial customers then there's every reason not to
drop support.

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joegahona
Wouldn't there be motive to move Clay's customers to Chorus, to cut down on
engineering costs of supporting two entirely different CMSs?

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cameronbrown
That sounds like an absolute nightmare of a migration.

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tengbretson
> Neither company would disclose the value of the deal.

I'm going to go ahead and assume this was less of a "buy" and more of a "took
on their debt in exchange for their assets" kind of situation

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joegahona
> “No one had to do this,” Pamela Wasserstein, the chief executive of New York
> Media, said on Tuesday. “It’s a brilliant, in our view, opportunity, so
> that’s why we leaned into it. It’s not out of need. It’s out of ambition.”

If it was such a great opportunity and not out of need, why wouldn’t they
disclose the value of the sale?

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sprsimplestuff
It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Vox Media has built up some
really good brands and I'd hate to see this drag them down. Odd that they
aren't folding related publications, as they're definitely going to have some
competing internal publications until they do. Makes sense for the employees
though, probably, to retain their own editorial style on each side of things

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bt848
It’s wild that Vox is an amateur baseball blog that mushroomed into a billion-
dollar media conglomerate.

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nwah1
You must be thinking of FiveThirtyEight.

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athriren
No. What became Vox was founded as an Oakland Athletics blog.

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aaomidi
Throw back to when people were saying unionizing will kill vox.

