1,115 karma · joined April 2, 2014
I’m cautiously optimistic for this simply bc of the team behind this.
the audience that was assembled was actually impressive and the PE money was used correctly to build an interesting portfolio of sites.
From there it was an operational disaster. All the important sites they had have been acquired by better run companies which confirms that the underlying assets were pretty good, they just needed to be run by someone else.
On good authority here's a good example: They have one of the top car blogs in the world, and had zero dedicated auto ad sellers. Anyone who knows auto in advertising knows you need people in LA and Detroit full time on the agencies and OEMs.
"Thanks to G/O's stubborn insistence that it only wanted Quartz's assets and not the corporate entity"...
this is not stubborn it's quite common and is absolutely the right thing to do for many companies interested in another business. If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes with all the legal liability.
Zach probably doesn't understand how much more likely his deal was to close as an asset purchase rather than a stock purchase. A stock purchase comes with lots more diligence and legalese. If they are buying your stock they are buying all your baggage and potential legal matters, it requires a lot more work including a laundry list of representations by the seller. G/O did everyone a favor by sticking to an asset purchase and getting the deal done. that's where the positives end it seems.
Here is an example of one site I ran a long time ago to illustrate:
Average daily unique users: 111,000 Total unique monthly users for the same period: 2MM unique users.
I could see how the interpretation of the average daily might have someone inferring it's x 30 for a month so call it 3.3MM users during the month but the actual monthly total is lower.
I don't think there is anything wrong with reporting daily especially if it's the type of site or app where the user is likely to be there on a daily basis vs say the websites of the past two decades where half the readers only come once and the other half come 2 -10+ times.
There are various reasons why a hot company might still have a syndicate including the syndicate lead was an early investor in the company so the founder is giving them an allocation in the subsequent rounds.
100% im glad they spent that money, they need MORE policing in the subways until they find a way to help the mentally ill unhomed.
The net change here is probably almost nothing, just the smaller sites that never use google ad manager will see the change but any publisher of note will have been operating with this for as long as they can remember.
With click through rates continuing to decrease it's likely they needed to make this change to keep the long tail sites happy and generating some revenue, they would back out the CPC to an effective CPM anyway.
Me:13+ years in digital publishing and advertising.
Barstool has a huge staff, I wonder if they will make some organizational changes the business should be very profitable overall.
I would love to see this price increased further + actual fines levied for mindless honking in stopped traffic.
I bought my friend the ski map book as a gift, highly recommend it.
The financing round doesn’t sound great and won’t last, just buying some time.
I also negotiated salaries etc early in the process so it's all generally done at the same time before the term sheet.