The $100 million wall: Digital media’s scale struggles
Summary
For men’s lifestyle player Complex Media, reaching $100 million was always a goal, said Rich Antoniello, CEO and founder. “It’s hard to win 1,000 deals every year,” said Todd Sawicki, the former CRO of Cheezburger and now CEO of Zemanta, a platform for buying native ads programmatically. One way to do this is by scaling their audience to new heights, which is why you see companies expanding overseas and to new verticals (Business Insider, The Huffington Post). But it’s hard and expensive to do well, and most video is not watched on publishers’ own sites but rather on social media platforms like Facebook, where there’s no clear path to monetization. “A lot of these VC-backed companies have generated scale on platforms that haven’t delivered on the promise of monetization,” said Michael Finnegan, president of Atlantic Media.
