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Verizon and Hearst Team Up To Buy Complex Media (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Verizon Wireless and Hearst Corp. are set to jointly acquire Complex Media. The "video-first" lifestyle site, focused on pop-culture trends and general entertainment, will continue to operate independently, albeit with Verizon and Hearst now each owning 50 percent stakes in the company. Complex CEO and co-founder Rich Antoniello will continue to lead the company. The WSJ reports that the deal values Complex Media between $250 million and $300 million. "The decision to acquire Complex is certainly a continuation of our media strategy, which is focused on disruption that is occurring in digital media and content distribution, and involves building a portfolio of the emerging digital brands of the future for the millennial and Gen-Z audience," said Brian Angiolet, Verizon's senior vice president of consumer product and marketing.
That Verizon guy is a champion.
Complex is certainly a continuation of our media strategy, which is focused on disruption that is occurring in digital media and content distribution, and involves building a portfolio of the emerging digital brands of the future for the millennial and Gen-Z audience
Days like this I feel like the Amish are onto something
lucm, indeed.
Never heard of them.
was a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome.
Stay out of Stockholm.
Word.
Any news yet on the massive Verizon employee strike and protest?
There's also a large protest in DC that few media outlets are covering... I wonder if its sponsored by George Soros, like #BlackLivesMatter?
They are copying the strategy of buying media companies. Just what we need, more consolidation.
For a given amount of content, video is easier to produce and insert interstitial advertising than text plus maybe graphics, but takes much longer for a person to digest or to retrieve bits of information from. If a web site wants to disengage me, the easiest way is to hide content behind a "play" button.
Spot on. I typically don't "see" video content out there. Much more so when the video comes with some "player" which forces upon me its crippled version of uh... "user experience".
Weren' it for clive and youtube-dl I wouldn't watch any videos off the internet (except those providing a plain old link to a straight video file).
Want my eyeballs? Cater for them. You don't care? Nor do I.
Web pages that insert videos for the sake of inserting videos are some of the first I quit visiting. Been to CNN recently? My god, they feel they have to have a video with every damn story, no matter how tangentially related the video is to the content. I swear, there could be an article on how Toyotas are spontaneously exploding and there'd be a video paired with it titled "Top 8 reasons you should by a Toyota today".
was it a good site?
Went to the link mentioned above (about.complex.com). Said to scroll down to see more... and had nothing to scroll down with. I'm guessing they don't like people who block their ads.
I did look at their main site. This is what the Internet doesn't need... another fluff site based on advertising, with extensive data analytics to slurp anything they can from a viewer's PC to sell. Whoopty fscking do.
Is this the best the US (namely Silicon Valley) can make, company-wise?
What happened to real products, which required engineers, R&D, _then_ the market-droids. Now, it is just market-droids, with some lawyers thrown in for measure. Want stuff that actually requires engineering? Gotta go to China or Russia to see actual innovation, not just garbage. "Media" sites like Complex are not innovation. There are many, many sites that do the same thing, be be it Buzzfeed or Cracked. If this is Silicon Valley innovation, then I better bone up on my Mandarin.
I'm just hoping the advertising ecosystem has the same thing the video game ecosystem did in 1983. Enough of this garbage.
Buying complex media is a bad idea. Didn't anyone over there ever hear the old saying "Keep It Simple Stupid?"
KISS, Verizon. KISS.
"Continue to operate independently" and "ownership by Verizon" are mutually exclusive statements.
Its just another web magazine site. Interviews, op eds, fashion, etc. Its all the same stuff that everyone else is doing.
How timely - Last night I logged onto vzw to check on my account status and saw a link for "reduce your network usage via FreeBee" - a Verizon version of "Binge On"
Intrigued I poked around and noticed that Hearst media and AOL are the primary companies offering content (Just look for the Bee). But I couldn't figure out how it worked - was VZW inserting the "bee" into my web stream - was it an ad on the websites. It isn't offered if you are on Wifi for instance.
Then in the FAQ I saw this strange comment: "A brand may direct encrypted content through a proxy in order to enable FreeBee Data. If the proxy option is chosen, the content will be temporarily unencrypted so the brand can be billed for the data usage."
Proxy? What proxy? Is VZW doing MIM stream editing? Using the gov't SSL keys? Proxy at the business level? or consumer to web level?
From ArsTechnica: "Hearst Magazines, AOL (which is owned by Verizon), and Lantern Software's GameDay"
http://freebee.verizonwireless...
http://freebee.verizonwireless...
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
Meanwhile, as Americans become more and more consumed by instant-gratification entertainment, they become dumber and dumber as the rest of the world passes them by in terms of education, productivity, and economic power.
On top of the video on every story, they all autoplay, with no way to stop it. If I wanted something making my computer talk and show video, I would click on the links with the camera on them, but every story having an autoplay video? What are they thinking?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?