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Uzabase sells Quartz to the site’s CEO and staff
Quartz is going private, with co-founder and CEO Zach Seward buying the business news site from its current owner Uzabase.
In his post announcing the deal, Seward described the move as a management buyout that will also see Editor in Chief Katherine Bell and the rest of the Quartz staff taking equity in the new company.
“Most of the time, I hope, Quartz’s finances and our corporate parentage are irrelevant, as long as we’re doing our job well,” he wrote. “But this is an important moment in the life of our company, and we want to share it with all of you, whose readership and enthusiasm for Quartz have carried us successfully through the past eight years.”
Seward suggested that while Uzabase’s ownership was “helpful,” the company is “better off right now as a startup, freer to chart our own path.” And as a startup, it’s looking to raise outside funding.
The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news that Uzabase wanted to sell the property, also reported that Uzabase CEO Yusuke Umeda (pictured above) has made a personal loan to support the site.
Quartz was founded in 2012 by Atlantic Media, then acquired by Uzabase (a Japanese financial data and media company) for $86 million in 2018.
The company has struggled to make the business side work in recent years, reporting a loss of $18.4 million on revenue of $26.4 million in 2019, and cutting about 80 staff positions earlier this year.
In an assessment of the site’s troubles published in June, Digiday’s Steven Perlberg noted Quartz has been restructuring around its subscription business, but he suggested that it’s been caught in digital media’s “mushy middle”: “Not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale.”
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Digital publisher Serial Box raises $4.5M
Serial Box, a startup bringing back the tradition of serialized fiction, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
The company actually disclosed the funding last week when announcing a partnership to produce stories about Marvel characters, but it’s sharing more details about the round — namely, the fact that it was led by Boat Rocker Media, with participation from Forerunner Ventures, 2929 Entertainment co-founder Todd Wagner and Japanese business intelligence and media firm Uzabase.
“We carefully chose trusted partners for this round of investment,” said co-founder and CEO Molly Barton in a statement. “They see the big opportunity that we do to retool reading for the smartphone age, to take the best elements of traditional book publishing and innovate with influences from the audio, podcast, gaming and TV industries.”
Serial Box publishes stories in text and audio format, broken up into weekly episodes. The first episode of each story is free — then if you’re hooked, you can pay $1.99 for additional episodes or sign up for a season pass.
The idea of making readers and listeners wait for the next chapter of the story may seem strange. Hasn’t Netflix trained us to want to binge the full season, as soon as possible? Maybe, but anyone who has watched “Game of Thrones” week-to-week knows that there’s still immense pleasure in waiting for smaller chunks of the larger story.
Behind the scenes, the company is borrowing from the TV production model, with a showrunner leading each writing time creating the stories. Serial Box writers include popular YA/science fiction/fantasy authors Gwenda Bond, Yoon Ha Lee, Max Gladstone and Becky Chambers. And, as mentioned, the company will also be publishing stories based on Marvel characters, starting with Thor.
The company says it will launch its Android app next week, with plans for more product upgrades and content partnerships in the coming months.
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