Meet The Digital Upstart That Thinks Millions Of Rowdy Fans Are The Future Of The Web
This story appears in the December 24, 2012 issue of Forbes.
What do you get when you mix a firebrand political blogger, an Internet innovator and a few million rabid sports fans? A valuable startup.
Jim Bankoff is sitting in a Manhattan diner, rather than the Four Seasons or some other power spot, and he’s nursing a single ginger ale, rather than a Bordeaux or martini. But that doesn’t keep the CEO of Vox Media from delusions of grandeur. “We want Vox to be the preeminent modern media publisher,” he says. “We look at what Condé Nast did in magazine publishing, and we can do that in digital publishing, meaning scale and quality and value.”
Whoa, there, Jim–put down that glass. Vox publishes SB Nation and two smaller sites. FORBES estimates revenues are $25 million and it’s only now breaking even. Those are pretty meager numbers for such grandiose talk.
But rather than dream of what probably won’t be, it’s more instructive to look at what currently is. Bankoff is one of the few digital publishers who seem to have cracked a riddle: How do you produce quality content that will also make money?
That digital mind-set comes naturally. Vox’s origins go back to 2003 and a political blogger, Markos Moulitsas, whose Daily Kos website became the go-to spot for activists eager to use their collective muscle to shape Democratic politics. This firebrand liberal also quietly proved himself quite a capitalist: Along with two allies, Jerome Armstrong (his coauthor on a political book) and Tyler Bleszinski, Moulitsas theorized that the same passion and tension (Democrats vs. Republicans) that built a large Daily Kos community could be applied to sports (Yankees vs. Red Sox). Their fledging company, bootstrapped almost entirely out of Moulitsas’ savings account, recruited amateur but dedicated bloggers who could match quality fan-centric content with technology to build hyper-local interactive communities that no cable channel could match. “It’s not a top-down pundit model,” says Moulitsas. “We find superfans and empower them with our tools, amplifying their voices.”
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It’s one thing to connect a legion of grassroots writers–and exponentially harder to make money at it. “I assumed that if we built traffic, Budweiser and Pepsi and Coke were going to bang down our doors to buy advertising,” says Bleszinski, who was also the site’s first local blogger. “That’s pretty naive. The old Field of Dreams adage: If you build it, they will come. That wasn’t the case at all.”
That’s where Bankoff came in. A self-professed media nerd who assembled a television programming grid for a second grade project, Bankoff, 44, got his start in the early days of AOL, licensing content by the hour for readers newly hooked on the World Wide Web. He later captured a wider audience with such sites as Moviefone, MapQuest, TMZ and FanHouse.
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