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PopSugar co-founder says pandemic will create ‘a huge windfall’ for digital media
It’s been less than a year since Group Nine Media acquired PopSugar — but it’s been a uniquely challenging time in digital media.
Brian Sugar founded the eponymous women’s lifestyle site with his wife Lisa Sugar . Post-acquisition, he’s become president for the entirety of Group Nine (which also owns Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker) and also joined the company’s board.
That job probably looks very different from what he expected last fall. The company had to lay off 7% of its staff back in April, which Sugar described as “one of the worst days of my career.” At the same time, he remains confident about the online advertising business. In his view, it’s TV advertising that’s taken a “huge punch” in the face and will never recover.
“We like to think of ourselves as one of the fastest, most innovative publishers out there,” Sugar told me. “And now’s the time for us to kind of show that off.”
You can read an edited, updated and condensed transcript of our conversation below, in which I talked to Sugar about how his role has evolved, how he motivates the team during difficult times and what gets lost in the shift to remote work.
TechCrunch: Obviously, it’s been a crazy couple of months since we last talked. What does your job look like now?
Brian Sugar: Well, I feel like a data miner, searching for answers. I feel like a hackathon engineer. And I feel like a therapist. You know, we like to think of ourselves as one of the fastest, most innovative publishers out there. And now’s the time for us to kind of show that off.
[We’ve just been] looking at data on how people are consuming our content across platforms. And on our site, we’ve come up with some really interesting ideas that we’ve implemented. We’ve been having these really cool hackathon Fridays to build stuff quickly, because a lot of people feel like they have a little bit more time on their hands — because you don’t have to travel to meetings, you can get more work done. Some people feel they’re more efficient.
We’re extremely optimistic. All our brands are extremely optimistic, and so is [the whole] company.
You mentioned launching some new products to respond to how audience behavior is changing. Are there any examples?
The first one [is] the PopSugar Fitness thing. We were planning on launching a paid workout subscription service in May, but everybody was working from home [in March], and we decided to pull the launch all the way up to as fast as we can launch it. We launched it that following weekend. Since the launch in late March, over the past few months, we’ve had 200,000 people sign up, and we have 50,000 monthly active users on it.
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Group Nine acquires PopSugar
Group Nine — the digital media company formed by the merger of Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker — just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire women’s lifestyle publisher PopSugar.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reports that it’s an all-stock transaction that values PopSugar at more than $300 million.
PopSugar was founded by husband-and-wife Brian and Lisa Sugar in 2006, and previously raised $41 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and IVP. Group Nine, meanwhile, just announced a fresh $50 million in funding from its backers Discovery and IVP, which it said would be used to grow its commerce business and for strategic acquisitions.
Brian and Lisa Sugar are both joining Group Nine’s executive team. Brian Sugar and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz are also joining Group Nine’s board of directors.
Earlier this year, there were reports that Group Nine was in talks to acquire a different women’s lifestyle publisher, Refinery29, which was ultimately acquired by Vice Media instead.
In a statement, Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above) said:
When we started Group Nine almost three years ago by combining Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo, and Seeker, we foresaw the impending consolidation of the industry and set out to create a model for the next-generation media company with significant scale, deeply loyal and engaged audiences, multiplatform expertise, and highly diversified revenue. POPSUGAR hugely expands our reach within an important demographic, bringing us a community that deeply loves the POPSUGAR brand and a company with the proven ability to diversify their revenue across premium advertising, affiliate, direct-to-consumer commerce, licensing, and experiential channels.
In the acquisition announcement, Group Nine says the combined organizations will reach an audience of more than 200 million social media followers and also points to PopSugar’s commerce offerings — including its quarterly subscription Must Have Box and its Glow marketplace for fitness content and merchandise — as a good fit for its broader ambitions in this market.
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