Pod Insights Equity Podcast Politico sells, Forbes SPACs, and Vice cuts About this episode The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat. The above episode is a discussion of a few things, in a loose and relaxed manner, so don't take any of the Verizon jokes too seriously, Verizon, as we still work for you. For a few more days.
Regardless, here's what Danny and Alex got into:
Politico sells for $1 billion: Its new parent company Axel Springer also buying the rest of Politico Europe and all of Protocol at the same time. This deal exploded everyone's Twitter feed due to its scale, and the fact that it was one heck of an exit for a media company. One billion dollars? For media? In this economy? Yes!
Forbes is going public via a SPAC: Yep, the venerable Forbes magazing and its enormous digital arm are taking the blank-check route to the public markets, which means that we got its numbers and time to stroll through them. Our take is that Forbes has done massive work to take its IRL brand and extend it into the digital world. The company has big plans to boot, and will be worth more than $800 million when it combines.
Layoffs hit Vice: As Vice turns its focus to video content — you've heard this story before — it is shedding some of its editorial staff. The layoffs were a stinkbomb on Media Twitter after the other news of the week, but were sadly not a huge surprise. The company's union decried them as something of a yearly recurrance. Not good, not good at all.
And there's more media news to come. Our parent company Verizon Media is expected to close its sale to Apollo on September 1 or sometime soon after, which means we will either be hosting Equity regularly as always, or we'll be hosting the RUDE (Recently Unemployed Due to (Private) Equity) podcast.
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity. We are live today over on Twitter Spaces. You might be hearing this a little bit later on, but this is Alex and I am joined by my IRL bestie Danny Crichton. Danny, we are here to talk about all things media. So give us the summary. Good news, bad news? Where are we?
0:26 Speaker 01 It's a mixed bag today. So we had Politico, Forbes and Vice news all going on today. So at the top of the show, we're going to talk about Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate buying Politico. Forbes is spacking and Vice had layoffs and is doing another pivot to video, which is not related to the last pivot to video or the pivot before that. So lots of pivots. So one is up, one is out and one is down. So it's a mixed bag. And on top of that, next week, we're closing, like I said, the Apollo acquisition for our parent company Verizon Media. So it is just media central going on here.
1:01 Speaker 00 Are we allowed to say that that deal is closing? Is that allowed?
1:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's public. It's still targeting for September 1st. And if you followed some of the coverage in either Business Insider or CNBC, our parent company apparently doesn't know anything of what's going on, which makes us feel very confident about the future.
1:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's nothing more confidence inspiring than not knowing who your CEO will be in four days' time. So maybe Danny, maybe they haven't told everyone yet because it's me or you. Maybe it could be us. Maybe we are the next Yahoo CEOs, apparently.
1:37 Speaker 01 Well, maybe the Harry Potter owl will deliver the golden envelope this weekend and I'll be pleasantly surprised.
1:43 Speaker 00 Sadly, we're both older than 11, so we're not going to Hogwarts. Let's start with Axel Springer and Politico. Danny, Politico, of course, a massive American political media enterprise, has a large paid subset called Politico Pro, runs a bunch of newsletters. You know, we have various views about its content, I'm sure, but the deal, not a big surprise, but a big price tag.
2:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, so Axel Springer is most well-known locally within Germany for its Bild newspaper, which is one of the most popular newspapers in the world, has in recent years really expanded out into the digital media world. So six years ago bought out Business Insider for 300 million and change. It did a joint venture with Politico a couple of years ago to build out what is known as Politico Europe. And recently with our friends at Morning Brew did what I guess a majority stake? They buy the whole thing or most of it?
2:32 Speaker 00 I think it was most of it.
2:34 Speaker 01 Most of it for Morning Brew, so connecting that into the Business Insider realm. And so it was big news today that they announced at a deal valued at around $1 billion that they're buying out the totality of Politico, the rest of their 50% stake in Politico Europe and our friends at Protocol, the new kind of policy tech site that just launched about, what, 18 months ago or so?
2:55 Speaker 00 Give or take, yeah. I have to say of all the media properties in the world, Protocol has had one of the most active early lives. It launched right before COVID hit. COVID hit, it laid off a bunch of its staff, then it staffed up massively. And in the middle of that staffing push, it got sold to Axel Springer. Danny, and Axel Springer is not owned by KKR, the private equity giant, but I think they own 46, 45% somewhere in there. Does that imply financial backing? Or does that just imply that someone's already tried to take a lot of the value out of the company?
3:26 Speaker 01 We believe it was a value deal. So they went in, took it private. It was used to be a publicly traded company. And KKR, it looks like they've been trying to scale up on the growth kind of value side. So trying to create value, investing in the properties. Certainly Business Insider, which has been owned by them the longest among these digital media brands, has expanded tremendously. I mean, looking at the staff just in the tech world that we know, it seems like everyone works at Business Insider these days.
3:50 Speaker 00 I mean, it was the other job I was talking to before I came back to TZ, frankly, because they were hiring. And I wanted a new job. And, you know, I have a lot of friends there. Thinking broadly, though, we have BI or Business Insider, or just Insider now, which is an enormous website network and also a paid product. Danny, they have their own paywall and so forth. Politico has paid products. Morning Brew doesn't really fit into this matrix. But what do you think the overall strategy here is? Is it to build an enormous ad-driven network? Is it to kind of monetize business-y and political content? Like, I'm trying to make this all line up in my head, and I'm kind of struggling. And I'm curious what you think.
4:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think they've had a huge focus on the business finance press. They do own some of those assets in the German press. Obviously, Business Insider fits within that context, Morning Brew. Axel Springer was also in talks earlier this year to buy Axios.
4:42 Speaker 00 Oh, I forgot about that.
4:44 Speaker 01 Which seemed to have broken apart. And according to at least some of the reporting I read the day, those talks are permanently off because of the Politico deal. So, you know, it seems like they wanted a Politico, a political and business publication. And Axios sort of spurned them, so they went with Politico instead.
5:01 Speaker 00 Brutal. And just to put context on how much money Axel Springer itself is worth. In the 2019 deal with KKR, they sold 43.54%. I happen to have the exact numbers here for roughly $3.2 billion. That's a converted currency number. So Axel Springer is worth $6, $7 billion, which means it's worth more than Yahoo, Danny.
5:22 Speaker 01 It is, which is actually kind of, I mean, it's both like a sad statement, but I think it's also a commentary on their classifieds business. Because the part that people don't see with Axel Springer is they own dozens of these digital classified sites. So job boards, for sale, wanted ads, all kinds of different things. They're still very valuable. You know, Hearst, I think, had a couple of these products over the years. They're not public and they're not very popular and you don't really think about them as highly valuable. They are. They still develop a lot of money and they still get a lot of revenue that way.
5:56 Speaker 00 Hey, being unpopular and profitable has been the tech rent model for 25 years now. Let's not get too spicy about that. But when it does come to companies building out a very broad media platform, of course, that brings us to Forbes. Forbes, a traditional business publication, magazine back in the day, ended up with quite a digital focus and has been rapidly expanding its product footprint, for lack of a better phrase, Danny. So going into the SPAC, before you saw the numbers and everything else, how optimistic were you about the Forbes business overall?
6:27 Speaker 01 Well, I think if you look at the digital media purchases over the year, the irony has always been that the digital media acquisitions have always been legacy brands. You look at Financial Times is a good example that got bought by Nikkei a couple of years ago.
6:40 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, that's right.
6:40 Speaker 01 Legacy brand, rebuilt for the digital world, rebuilt around subscription, proved the model and was super popular. Forbes, I believe, got started in, I want to say, the 1930s. I could be off of a little bit, plus or minus there. Went through a couple of generations of the Forbes family owning it. Malcolm Forbes, Steve Forbes, and then most recently has really focused on digital and has been one of the most successful properties. So there's the core product, which is just news and feature pieces. But then Forbes has also created a bunch of franchises over the years, like Forbes 30 Under 30, The Midas List, which has been around a long time, but has obviously been popularized with the rise of tech in the last 10, 15 years. And you see the numbers.
7:21 Speaker 01 So in 2013, digital actually surpassed print revenue at Forbes eight years ago. Just to give you a comparison, I think The New York Times surpassed it last year from digital into print. So way earlier to that. And according to the numbers we had from the SPAC deck, 150 million folks in the digital audience in 2020. So huge reach, huge amounts of dollars valued at, I guess, Alex, an enterprise value of $685 million with some tax credits built into that.
7:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, and then once you throw in the cash, because enterprise value, of course, strips out cash and adds debt, which is an important way to think about the price of an acquisition. But we, in this kind of techrenchie world, tend to think more about equity values. So to put that number on it, Forbes will be worth around $830 million in equity terms after the combination. And that does assume certain things like no redemptions and so forth. So the final number will be a little bit different. But after all this work, Danny, after nearly 100 years, give or take, in business, it's 83% of a unicorn, which, as a person who works in media, does not... Make me super happy. Like, I wish Forbes was worth 10 times this much.
8:27 Speaker 01 Well, for sure. And I mean, it's worth double what Business Insider sold in 2015. So I think you're seeing a little bit of expansion and value there. But there are some crazy numbers. So 500,000 print subs, which is actually not too shabby for the magazine industry today.
8:40 Speaker 00 Not at all.
8:41 Speaker 01 But the number that blew my mind, which you shared, Alex, is that they had a quote from the deck, 17 staff writers for this place. And I don't know what a staff writer is, because they also have 100 content producers. And I want to believe that there isn't some sociological difference in those two jobs, because one sounds awesome and the other sounds...
9:00 Speaker 00 Terrifying.
9:01 Speaker 01 A new economy, I was gonna say.
9:04 Speaker 00 And when you say, when you say new economy in that sense, you have to do it in U with an umlaut, like new middle.
9:10 Speaker 01 Exactly. Stumpstakian, I think, was the new term. Yes.
9:14 Speaker 00 And to be clear, though, this, this fact also breaks out reporters and senior reporters, of which there are 28. And so it's a little hard to tell exactly what's what here. But call it 50 on the staff and reporting side, 100 content producers, 176 total house editorial staff. Not that big, frankly. They were smaller than I expected in terms of, of, of just people paid to write. But given their kind of massive franchise of everything from lists to a thing called Q.ai, which apparently is an investing app that Forbes built that I hadn't heard of. They've really leveraged this brand. I'm trying to think about a, to the hilt, I think, is just, let's be fair. They've, they've leveraged it pretty hard and they've gotten this far.
9:57 Speaker 00 And my only real hope is that the core Forbes writing experience persists, because people like Alex Conrad and a bunch of other folks there are fantastic.
10:05 Speaker 01 Well, we had Alex on the program just a couple of weeks ago. And we also learned that Alex lives like 100 feet away from me, which was fun. But the actual crazy thing, talking about leverage, we also found out, because the company gave us the number, 2,650 contributors on the Forbes network. So all these columnists you've seen, obviously very popular on LinkedIn, it's on everyone's sort of bio and resume page. But I guess I expected that number to be higher. I don't know if there was some sort of qualifier, or maybe it's active in the last year. But I expected to be more like 10,000, not 2,600. So I was a little surprised by that number.
10:42 Speaker 00 Remember that time we had the Crunch Network at TechCrunch?
10:45 Speaker 01 I do remember viscerally, in the sense that the wounds are still visible on my, yeah.
10:51 Speaker 00 You've given away my next question, but Danny, how did you feel about Crunch Network overall as a general business strategy?
10:55 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, the wounds weren't self-inflicted, thankfully. They were inflicted by others into me. But it was hard, right? Because keeping the quality bar, and most people are not full-time writers, are not that great at writing. It's a skill, it's a technique, it requires a lot of practice. As you well know, Alex, if you get out of practice, even for a professional writer, it can be a lot of hard to get back into the flow of things. So the Crunch Network was always one of these like high-value ads. We still have guest posts occasionally on Extra Crunch. But it's hard to always deliver great stuff when people are not doing it professionally.
11:28 Speaker 00 And that's what I was trying to get, what I'm trying to get towards, which is why I'm not surprised to see this contributing number smaller than we might have guessed. Because I think Forbes has tightened up. I mean, if you go back a couple of years ago, I felt like there was much more stuff coming out on Forbes from folks. And it seems to have gotten better. And that's good, you know? I think that's, that's a great way to approach things. And certainly they've kept scaling because Forbes is expecting, I think it's three and a half billion monthly page views right now. Which is a number that I struggle to kind of get my head around because TechCrunch is a pretty big site, but we're not that big. You know, like, holy geez, that's a, they claim to be a top 50 website, uh, which is very impressive. That's, that's high.
12:01 Speaker 01 Well, and that reach does go down to the bottom line. So we haven't talked, I think, too much about revenues, but, um, good, decent growth in the last couple of years. Minus 2020 because of the COVID situation, but Alex, these numbers are really small and maybe you have better eyesight than me. I have my opia, but this number looks like $178 million if I'm reading it properly.
12:20 Speaker 00 I'm gonna, I pulled up the deck. We pulled some of the deck into our notes, Doc, which shrunk the numbers from, from, from small to minuscule.
12:27 Speaker 01 I think this is font size two going on here, but from my read, it's 178 million in 2019, going down to 163 million top line revenue in 2020. The margins at the contribution margin level is 56% and declining to 53% in 2020.
12:46 Speaker 00 Nope, Danny, stop reading. You can't, you're reading the numbers wrong. It went up to 63% in 2020 and they expected to roughly stay there. And the revenue numbers that Danny just shared are X Magazine. So what Forbes has done is essentially broken out its magazine revenues because they're declining. 33 million in 2019, 20 million last year, expecting 18 million this year, and then 16 million in 2022. And so the company is really saying, look, our future. Is digital and we have this legacy business, but certainly it is fading and is not the thing you should be thinking about when you consider Forbes. They really want that digital softwarey, not multiple, obviously, but like at least Patino or not even veneer, but DNA. There you go. That's the polite way of saying it.
13:27 Speaker 01 And look, profitable at 19% EBITDA, which is something you can't say about most SaaS companies. So Magnum Opus acquisition, the SPAC that is going out here just debuted. All the docs are available on their website. If you're really curious about the model further. But I think it's a, it's a pretty good story altogether. And I think this is the first of many. I mean, I think there's what eight or nine SPACs focused on media and particularly digital media buyouts. We've seen it with BuzzFeed, a few others. I expect a few more of these to go in the coming weeks. And even publicly, if you read some of the stuff about our parent company, I believe CNBC was the one who reported that they're trying to break us up and possibly SPAC us all. So we may be part of the fun, you know, trend all the same time.
14:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was literally going to say, let's get into some more trouble, given that we haven't stirred the pot enough on the internal side. And Danny, do you think that TC is going to get broken off by Apollo and then SPACed?
14:22 Speaker 01 I know, I know, actually not a lot confidentially because no one on the business side tells me anything. So I feel like I can actually talk a lot. On the editorial side, I can tell you that a bunch of people have reached out being like, how do I buy you? And I'm like, you're probably talking to the wrong person. I work, I write, I write words down on the page.
14:45 Speaker 00 Danny is my boss's boss, as we like to joke on the show, but he's not in charge of the business. Like we have a firewall between the two halves. One half writes and the other half makes words into money, which is great. And we appreciate them, but we're not them. And we don't know.
14:57 Speaker 01 I'm somehow Alex's boss's boss, but he has more power over me. So I don't know how that works. That's called structuralistness or holocracy, which we practice pretty religiously here at TechCrunch. But I will say, one of the benefits for us is we are not at this price point. We are definitely not at the 650 to a billion dollar price for TechCrunch, which does open the field to a lot of non-traditional buyers. So that's the family offices have reached out, you know, even some VCs have reached out to potentially buy us or at least ping Apollo and be like, hmm, interesting. You have this property over there. It seems like you want to invest in gaming. This TechCrunch thing, we'd love to take off of your hands. So we will, shall see.
15:38 Speaker 00 Let's just say, I like, I like to be clear. I'm a kind of dyed-in-the-wool tech rancher. This is my second stint. Big love for the brand. Very lucky to have worked longitudinally with a bunch of people here. And so we will always poke fun and make light and, you know, generally be our jerk selves. But like, I'm really, really, really crossing my fingers and toes that we end up well through this, this period of transition, as it were, because TechCrunch is a special place. And I really want to preserve what we have. And so I'm determined to be optimistic and I'm going to stick with it.
16:10 Speaker 01 I will say, I've only worked here a couple of years, but this is my fourth brand I will work under. So when I joined, it was AOL and then it was Oath and then Verizon Media. And now it is Yahoo with an exclamation point. So it just goes to show you that even though some things stay the same, that would be TechCrunch, things around us are always changing. But talking about always change, we should move on to Vice and our last topic here. We found out unfortunately this morning that a set of folks, I guess we don't necessarily know the exact full number around Vice, that there have been layoffs this morning from the team as they sort of reposition the company for video growth going forward.
16:47 Speaker 00 Okay, I've lost the plot entirely on which round this is. So we've done the pivot to video several years ago and then everyone got fired and Vice had layoffs and then Vice was supposed to go public and then it didn't. And now they're pivoting to video again and they've laid off for, I really, you know that, that time is flat circle thing? Like it really hits me hard here because I'm losing my ability to keep the various Vice sagas figured out. Like I can't, this is what, the fourth round of layoffs I've, I think I've seen from Vice? Who's, it's not good.
17:16 Speaker 01 I mean, this has been an extremely fast growing company that then, you know, sort of recovered when they figured out that the EBITDA margin wasn't there. But what was interesting is, you know, I think Vice more than anyone has tried to constantly reinvent itself to adapt to the changing media environment. So it started as a magazine, you know, went digital very early, did pivot to video when that was popular with Facebook, you know, went back to text in longer form, feature articles, now back to video. And according to a leaked email from the leadership at Corey, I said that our audiences live in a 360 quote, surround sound media environment. And we need to reposition the company to, to basically target that. Alex, when you hear the term 360 surround sound media environment, what comes to mind?
18:00 Speaker 00 Well, after I finished vomiting into my own hands, what I, what I hear and see are the fingerprints of overpaid consultants.
18:09 Speaker 00 I mean, I don't know, I don't know what that means. Does that just mean that people are busy and have options? Because that's always been the case. Like, think of, think about 360 media environments back in the day when they were competing local newspapers in every single city, right? That was a loud media environment, too. We had the radio. I mean, this isn't new. It may be fractionally worse, but like, I, duh.
18:27 Speaker 01 I was just reading.
18:27 Speaker 00 That's my opinion.
18:28 Speaker 01 I was just reading a history of Berlin, the city, and found out in the 1920s and 1930s that there were more than 100 daily newspapers in Berlin alone covering the news. And I was like, that's a lot.
18:40 Speaker 00 That's amazing. We could have, Danny, you and I could have been competing micro paper barons. How fun would that have been? I would have published like, you know, Danny Crighton steals hat. It'd be great.
18:50 Speaker 01 Well, you know, that's sad because also in the same memo from Corey at Vice notes that due to a precipitous decline in text consumption over the last few years, roughly 75%, the text will no longer be a major focus for Vice going forward. And I saw that, and I'm a text writer. I barely know how to talk into a microphone. In fact, I've gotten so good, I'm actually talking into two microphones right now. It's pretty incredible.
19:13 Speaker 00 Yes, we are.
19:14 Speaker 01 And I didn't even have to use tape this time. But still not comfortable with videos and still haven't installed TikTok. More as an affectation than anything. But Alex, what is the future of text? Because when I read this and I see major sites sort of doing the pivot, getting rid of the spoken word, so to speak, or the written word, you know, what's the future for a lot of classic news, which oftentimes doesn't, you know, get delivered the best in video or audio products?
19:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, I just don't buy it. That me, that print is dead. I mean, one, it's been around literally forever, and it's incredibly popular in a number of formats. You know, TC's audience is large, and people read us more than they watch us. I mean, we do occasionally post equities recordings on YouTube because it's kind of like a, like a freebie for us to lay up, if you will. But fundamentally, TechCrunch is a written property with a couple of podcasts. I mean, that still, it still remains our. Core focus. And you know, when I think about the New York Times and what they've built as a subscription product over the last five years, it's text. That's their main product. Sure, the Daily is a great show. But if you took away the Daily, the Times would be okay. If you took away the Times, the Daily is dead. And that to me is the is the difference between
20:28 Speaker 00 this kind of blather, which is just surrender, as far as I can tell. And and, you know, long form, long term, written articles creation, which is great. I mean, the Atlantic gaining the last 18 months and how much it's grown by writing long form, great stuff that was topical.
20:46 Speaker 01 I know, shock. No 360 surrounds how media environment going on over there?
20:51 Speaker 00 I mean, look, I've got like, how many computers in this room? And it's not even 360. You know what I mean? Like, what are they talking about? I mean, I think everyone who's like 50 and older thinks that children just have a phone duct taped to their face. And then someone just plays TikTok all day. That's not actually the case.
21:09 Speaker 01 You haven't walked around Brooklyn more recently, Alex. I can tell because the duct tape is real. But I think that's a media shot. That's what's going on in the world today. Are we doing Q and A?
21:20 Speaker 00 Uh, no, we're not. We have to jump.
21:21 Speaker 01 We gotta jump. Oh, it's three. Oh, shit. Oh, I shouldn't swear. Oh, it's PG 13. Oh.
21:26 Speaker 00 You can't say fuck on the show. Uh, listen. Next week, next week is a couple of things. If you're if you're hanging out with us right now, listen up. It's it's Y Combinator Demo Day. And it's Transition Day for the broader Verizon Media Group family. So if you see your local tech owner's reporter, we can't do hugs because of COVID, but buy them a coffee or something. Because it's going to be a weird, weird, hard week. So think about us. And with that, Equity is back tomorrow morning. So goodbye.
Previous OnlyFans' policy change is a tale as old as the internet Next The pure hell of managing your JPEGs Page updated October 14, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
