VOX MEDIA

Founders: Jerome Armstrong, Tyler Bleszinski, Markos Moulitsas
Key people: Jim Bankoff (Chairman, CEO), Marty Moe (Pres.)
Number of employees: 400+

Vox Media is an American multinational digital media company founded on August 1, 2002 as SportsBlogs Inc. by Jerome Armstrong, Tyler Bleszinsky, and Markos Moulitsas and based in Washington, D.C. and New York City. It currently runs eight editorial brands: SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Curbed, Eater, Racked, Vox, and Recode. Vox’s brands are built on Chorus, its proprietary content management system.

The company owns and operates its offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco. The network now features over 300 sites with over 400 paid writers.

History

Vox Media was founded in 2002 as SportsBlogs, Inc., the parent company of the sports blog network SB Nation, by political strategist Jerome Armstrong, freelance writer Tyler Bleszinski, and Markos Moulitsas (creator of Daily Kos). The site was a spin-off and expansion of Tyler Bleszinski’s Oakland Athletics blog Athletics Nation, which sought to provide coverage of the team from a fan’s perspective. The popularity of the site led to other sports blogs being incorporated.

In 2008, SB Nation hired former AOL executive Jim Bankoff as CEO to assist in its growth. He showed interest in SB Nation’s goal of building a network of niche-oriented sports websites. As of February 2009, the SB Nation network contained 185 blogs, and in November 2010, ComScore estimated that the site had attracted 5.8 million unique visitors. The 208 percent increase in unique visitors over November 2009 made SB Nation the fastest-growing sports website the company tracked at the time.

In 2011, Bankoff hired a number of former writers from AOL’s technology blog Engadget, including former editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, to build a new technology-oriented website. They had originally left AOL following a series of conflicts between Topolsky and Michael Arrington, author of TechCrunch (which AOL had recently acquired), and the leak of an internal training document that outlined a content strategy for AOL’s blogs that prioritized profitability. Bankoff felt that a technology-oriented website would complement SB Nation due to their overlapping demographics.

In November 2011, the company, now renamed Vox Media, officially launched The Verge, with Topolsky as editor-in-chief.

In 2012, Vox launched a video gaming website, Polygon, led by former Joystiq editor Christopher Grant.

In November 2013, Vox Media acquired the Curbed network, which consisted of the real-estate blog network Curbed, the food blog Eater, and the fashion blog Racked.

In April 2014, the company launched an eponymous news website, Vox.com; led by former Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein, Vox.com was positioned as a general interest news service with a focus on providing additional context to recurring subjects within its articles.

In May 2015, Vox Media acquired Recode, a technology industry news website that was founded by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, the former editors of The Wall Street Journal‘s AllThingsD.

On May 30, 2017, Vox Media announced that it had entered into an agreement to provide technology and advertising sales for Bill Simmons’ The Ringer, as part of a revenue sharing agreement.