Vox Media’s Bankoff is Battered but Standing. What’s Next?
After a massive valuation cut, Vox Media—owner of New York magazine, The Verge and Eater—is searching for its next growth spurt. But with meager revenue growth and in a standoff with Meta Platforms, CEO Jim Bankoff has a long hill to climb to put Vox on course to be a public company.
Last summer, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff met with representatives from Facebook parent Meta Platforms to catch up on business. The meeting was timely. A few months before, Vox, owner of New York magazine and websites including Eater and The Verge, had bought Group Nine Media, a smaller collection of websites such as The Dodo, which makes cute animal videos that are popular on Facebook and Instagram.
While the acquisition made Vox 50% bigger in revenue, it also made the privately held company more dependent on Meta for ad revenue than it had been in the past. The timing was bad. Shortly after the deal closed, Meta began pushing its audience toward TikTok-like short video clips on its new Reels feature, putting less emphasis on the longer videos The Dodo made. The shift squeezed the Dodo’s ad revenue. As a result, Bankoff spent part of the meeting complaining about Meta pulling back support for publishers like Vox, according to two people familiar with the meeting.