Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Today it was revealed that Vox Media, owner of The Verge, SB Nation, and Polygon has raised another $40 million of funding.

...But bigger exits are emerging: There was Huffington Post and Bleacher Report. There’s that Vice valuation. And even Swisher and Mossberg without a site are rumored to be in the $30 million valuation size — bigger than what TechCrunch sold for after six years. A pattern is forming.

The investments in Buzzfeed and Vox in particular show that well-heeled investors believe that new media can be more than just profitable lifestyle businesses buoyed by non-scalable event franchises. These guys are betting there are big public companies here.We’re seeing the same kind of transition with content that we saw with the early Web 2.0 companies like Delicious and Flickr. They sold out cheap at first as projects morphed into companies and then the next generation thought bigger....

The 85 million unique visitors per month that BuzzFeed draws per month makes its content strategy worth examining--even if the news site's trademark articles draw a fine line between hard news and lunch-hour entertainment.

Recently named the "most social" publisher on Facebook thanks to its 16 million interactions on the platform in August, BuzzFeed is relying more on social outreach than search engine optimiziation (SEO) to rake in the views.

News organizations should embrace a social-first mindset, think about how likely it is that a piece of content will be shared on social platforms from the get-go, and stop worrying about their SEO strategy, said BuzzFeed President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Steinberg at a recent MIPCOM conference in France....