APBRmetrics

From Wikipedia: "As of June 2013, Vox says that SB Nation has reached 50 million unique visitors per month and 190 million monthly page views..." So they "engaged" people for an average of 4 pages per month (for a few minutes?) and they are a company valued at over $1 billion? How many of those 50 million looked at or clicked on an ad? I very rarely do either... because it doesn't appeal At All.

The ringer.com leaves Medium.com for these guys?

Still a private company. In 2014 the Wall Street estimated it generated $60 million in annual revenue via 8 major sites (SB being one) and was "profitable". Like how much? $10 million, $1 million? If $10 mil., that is a 1% return on valuation. $1 mil., 0.1% return. At 1 billion content views per month that revenue splits out to 0.5 cents by monthly page view.

How about the ringer.com? Is current revenue over or under $5 million per year? Way under? Or way, way, way under? Businessinsider.com cites a traffic estimate of under 400,000 unique visitors per month, 1/3rd of the peak at launch. And they have a payroll of 60-70 people? And "money is not a problem" according to Simmons? Capital infusions or operating income?

Will we see True Hoop rise up? To get private capital? Can they exceed the ringer?

Who in the sports digital media space or the NBA space is making an average return on capital, an average profit on revenue for all companies or even just media companies?

The ringer.com leaves Medium.com for these guys?

I just want to point out that ringer left Medium due to changes in how medium supports advertising. I do have many of the same questions you have regarding these companies and their valuations. I don't see a path to profitability with their current (assumed) spending rates.

How did the Medium change its advertising game? I didn't focus on them.

Medium moved out of the ad revenue game completely. As of January this year they no longer sell ads nor do they help publishers who use them as a host with ad sales/ad revenue.

https://blog.medium.com/renewing-medium ... f374a960be

Yeah, I went out and saw that. So back to subscriptions? In a land of thousands of offerings that won't work for most. The subscription model largely broke before and because of digital media. People like speed, no hassle and diversity.

Subscription works for kenpom I guess. Pimping for daily fantasy sports works for others. Donations, worth a try. Merch? Few do it, not sure how promising. Depends on the creativity and quality of the merchandise.

If you want to write, write. If you want a business, figure out a business model in a tough, chaotic world. I am not sure how far I want to go as a reader to figure it out / save the writer. What will I pay for 5-10 paragraphs at a time? Nothing or next to nothing. Ad annoyance has been the longtime compromise. I might pay for major works / datasets / analysis. Not for surface skimming summaries & gossip.

Many writers, few successful advertising "pros" . Not the Medium, probably not the ringer.com, not really vox.com yet either by the metrics I see, other than all the private capital it attracts. "Tech" fantasies still sell. Should have been enough evidence of what doesn't work in last 20 years.

I think one thing to remember is the operating costs of these websites is very low. I'd think their single largest cost for any site is the physical office space. Vox Media has 6 offices in total, but with the hundreds of sites they operate, the majority of their writing staff works from their own homes or private offices. They don't need to make a crazy amount of money each year to be able to turn a profit because of such low operating costs. They're a private company, so it's very hard to find actual numbers.

Does anyone know if they use a CPM model or a CPC model for advertising? If they use a CPM model, than the 800 million monthly page views they got were incredibly valuable. If it's CPC, it'll be much harder for us to even guess how much money advertising brings in for them. I've worked in Radio advertising, trust me that with their margins they make a really solid return on investment because of such low operating costs. It helps that Vox Media is branching out from just internet writing content to E-Commerce and some music platform. They're growing at a time that more traditional media like ESPN is struggling to maintain audience.