In the crowded and cutthroat landscape of digital media, Vox Media has been one of the survivors, keeping costs under control and growing through acquisition of such properties as New York magazine and its websites, as well as Recode, adding these to properties purchased earlier, The Verge and SBNation. CEO Jim Bankoff said that Vox has “taken a lot of risks and grown, but what we haven’t done is we haven’t been reckless.” Numerous other digital media startups, such as Mic and Mashable, either shuttered or were sold for a fire sale price.
As Bankoff said: “Now that the tide has gone out, you can see who was built to last and who was built to grow and who wasn’t.”