Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
April 17, 2017, 2:49 p.m.
Business Models

Elite Daily has done pretty well for a publication that doesn’t do very well.

The Daily Mail’s parent company, DMGT, acquired it for at least $26 million in January 2015, then announced at the end of last year that it was writing down that investment because of Elite Daily’s “disappointing” performance. Nonetheless, Bustle, another site aimed at millennials, has acquired Elite Daily, presumably for a fair bit less than what Daily Mail paid. Business Insider reported the news Monday, and here is DMGT’s press release. Bustle’s parent company is now known as Bustle Digital Group; it also includes millennial mom site Romper.

“This property is valuable, I know it’s valuable,” Bustle founder (and Bleacher Report co-founder) Bryan Goldberg told Business Insider. “If there’s one person who doesn’t care what the press thinks, it’s me.” (The New Yorker on Goldberg in 2013: “When Goldberg talks about his entry into women’s publishing, he can bring to mind an episode of The Simpsons, in which Homer, discovering that bacon, ham, and pork chops all come from pigs, calls them a ‘wonderful, magical animal.'”)

The acquisition is meant to help with video and social media stuff. Elite Daily has 1.4 million Instagram followers and 3.2 million Facebook followers, compared to Bustle’s respective 1.6 million and 1.4 million. “Elite Daily, Refinery29 and Bustle are what I hear when I ask [our users] what they read,” Goldberg told Business Insider. (Refinery29 recently restructured after struggling to break 20 million monthly uniques, and has become less interested in covering hard news than it claimed to be at one point.)

Elite Daily’s “About” page shows upwards of 50 staffers. Its executive editor, Caitlin Abber, tweeted Monday that she’s now out of work. Bustle’s staff page shows a whopping 113 employees.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
“The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.”
BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
The New York Times and the Washington Post compete with meme accounts for the chance to be first with a big headline.
In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question
Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest — but ultimately rejected them all.