The Lifeboats Are Getting Smaller

Tech media consolidation continues, but deals, sites, and staffs are shrinking.

Last summer, I wrote about ongoing consolidation in the tech media space, and specifically about my former employer, CNET, being sold to longtime rival Ziff Davis and my *other* former employer, Gizmodo, being sold to a small Swiss/French company with little-to-no experience in the US media market.

Now it's time to revisit this topic, with the news that TechCrunch, one of the tech publications I thought had been fairly successful in maintaining a serious tone and avoiding a clickbait race to the bottom, was sold by longtime owner Yahoo to Regent, "a Los Angeles-based investment firm."

Fun fact -- Regent is also an owner or investor in brands including Wonderbra, Club Monaco, and Rate My Professors, according to its portfolio page. It also recently acquired IDG's media brands, like PCWorld and Macworld, and also owns the once-buzzy Cheddar News (where I was a regular guest for several years).

Does this sound like good news for any of these brands? Gentle reader, it does not. Whenever private equity gets involved, it's rarely to invest *more* in a brand and make it better.

Amid the ongoing destruction of the media biz, surviving brands are clinging to whatever rescue they can, but the lifeboats keep getting smaller.

CNET spent a dozen years as part of CBS (which then became ViacomCBS and is now known as Paramount, and about to be merged into Skydance) before being sold to a company called Red Ventures, and a few years later sold again -- shrinking each time through either layoffs, buyouts, or attrition.

Gizmodo has had several corporate owners, including big media companies like Univision, before being chewed up by a PE company and most recently flipped to a new media operator, but with a smaller staff than when I departed in late 2023.

As for TechCrunch, say what you will about the Yahoo/AOL hydra, but it's owned and operated a lot of big media publications over the years and kept a lot of journalists employed.

And while some of my favorite publications are surviving, it's often at the cost of climbing into a series of ever-smaller lifeboats. What happens when we reach the logical conclusion of that path? Is that a single human editor-in-chief supervising a virtual newsroom of AI bots? Or does everything have to become a sole-proprietorship newsletter with near-zero overhead, but also near-zero resources? Some of these deals doubtless happen just because someone wants to milk any remaining SEO authority a media brand might have.

And if the lifeboats get too small, then you end up like AnandTech, Reviewed.com, Waypoint, etc. Just gone. What's lost in those cases is more than just another source for interesting or useful information, it's the wholesale hollowing out of valuable institutional memory.

When journalism becomes just another algorithmic output, it's unable to ask the right questions, because it's too busy asking for a pat on the head from Google, TikTok, Perplexity, or whoever else is pulling the strings that quarter.

But there are bright spots. Game Informer has just announced it is re-starting under new ownership, with much the same team it had when it was shut down in 2024. Small one-man newsletters like Oliver Darcy's excellent Status are adding full-time staff. And I've made it to the one-year mark with MC News, launched in March 2024, having published more than 350 articles in that time with the help of a single full-time assistant editor and an army of expert freelancers (and the amazing support of corporate parent Micro Center).

But for every bit of good news, there's a flood of reports about how Google's AI strategy is killing both SEO traffic and affiliate revenue for sites that depend on these things, or another website shutdown like FiveThirtyEight.

The challenge ahead isn’t just about who owns what or ads vs subscription vs affiliate clicks. It’s whether there’s a chance to build something sustainable before there’s no room left on the remaining boats.

Check out the new Namco Bandai store in Brooklyn!

Just down the street from the Brooklyn Micro Center is a new Bandai Namco Cross Store, with sections for Gundam models, Tamagotchi toys and a lot more. Check out my video visit: