Zukes

@zukes.bsky.social

39 Followers 195 Following

Nurse, video games, public transportation, new parent, health care reform advocate, pro-union, armchair urban planner, and howling leftist.

The stock price of Allbirds surged more than 700% to top $20 after the company said it’s shifting gears and moving into the AI compute infrastructure industry, while changing its name to NewBird AI. The Allbirds name will stay with the shoe brand that the company has already agreed to sell to American Exchange Group.
What Does Media Mean Now? Earlier this month, gaming website Polygon was sold by Vox Media to Valnet, an e-slop farm that publishes a bunch of sites you accidentally click on when you’re trying to find real articles about stuff you care about. I wrote a bunch for Polygon at the start of the pandemic and they were always really good to me. The staff over there were some of the best in the biz and most of them were fired during the sale. Polygon video producer Simone de Rochefort, who survived the transfer to Valnet, sent a barnburner of an email to Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff, which you can read here. Here’s another good piece about Polygon worth checking out, as well. This was all bad enough, but The New York Times reported this morning that tech journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher and her co-host Scott Galloway inked a new deal with Vox Media and are getting $40 million four-year contracts. And, as many have noticed, The Times story does not mention the Polygon sale. Also, the claims that Swisher and Galloway’s podcast is making as much as they claim it does are a bit dubious. All of this has led me to ask the question I opened with up top. What does this say about The State Of The Media Now? And from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t say anything good. If a company like Vox can’t figure out how to properly monetize and support a website in 2025, but feels comfortable dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a podcast where the hosts have more name recognition than Vox does, things are real bad. And when it all goes bust, Swisher and Galloway will be fine. Will the same be said for media brands?
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