Enshittification continues its boring dystopian sprawl…
After being purchased by private equity backed marketing firm Red Ventures in 2020, the company has been in a downward…
Red Ventures?
I know someone who works there. Despite them explaining to me, more than once, what RV does, I still have no idea what Red Ventures actually does.
My guess: turn failing big companies into failing little ones.
A private equity firms purchase usually means they’ll strip the company and its customers/users of as much value as possible, then sell whatever scraps (brand) is left over.
Strip them for parts (which is to say extract all the value in the form of golden parachutes)
From wiki
Red Ventures is an American media company that owns and operates brands such as Lonely Planet, CNET, ZDNet, The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate.[1] Red Ventures focuses on news, advice, and review websites.[2]
Seems pretty straightforward.
I realize the article was written to make it sound like they lost money on this, but I would be shocked if they had.
To vastly oversimplify it, private equity does a few things to make money on the companies they acquire:
- Significantly reduce staff, and increasing workload
- Strip and sell off individual assets
- Load the company with debt
The last parts are where it goes from amoral to “HOW THE FUCK IS THAT LEGAL?”
The private equity firm will have its own separate entities that provide a variety of services, for example janitorial or administrative.
The new private equity owners will then replace all the current vendors, with their own entities at a expentionally hirer costs. All the while, paying themselves gigantic consulting fees.
Basically those are all just ways to legally embezzle money by extracting all the resources from the company. Once that’s done, they’ll sell the last thing of value: the brand name itself e.g. CNET, VICE, etc.
If there is no money in the brand itself, then they’ll just dissolve the company.
Someone got ripped off.
But someone else leveraged their assets to create synergy. So they can be proud of that, at least.
I would like to see more articles in this community about technology, and fewer about corporate valuations/politics/etc.
You and me both. Seems like we’re in the minority, though. If I wanted business news, I’d be on a business community.
Come to think of it, this article isn’t even about a company that produces technology. It’s about the purchase of a company that once upon a time used to write stories about other companies that might or might not have done something notable with technology.
It doesn’t get much more off-topic than this. I’m reporting it.
Report these articles with “Business news, not tech news”, and there’s a high chance it’ll be removed.
It’s tragic when a company loses so much value due to losing sight of the next big hype train. I’m sure they tried to pivot from blockchain into AI, but didn’t quite make the leap in time to save themselves. (Sarcasm)
What about… hear me out here… AI-chain. I think this has legs!
It basically got bought by Ziff Davis, which is ironic because, years ago, ZDnet (run by Davis) was run out of business by CNET.
Cute
“Private Equity” says it all.
They jumped the shark when Buzz Out Loud ended.
I hope this is at least the beginning of the turning point for companies’ mad dash to total enshittification. It can be, if we, on massive, global levels, simply stop accepting it.
TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), once a long-standing trusted source for Apple news, recently became an AI clickbait farm owned by an equity firm. The pictures of the columnists that used to work there are now being posted on fake articles against fake names.
Now all CNET links are suspect for the same reason.
Slowly but surely the web I grew up with is becoming zombified garbage.
The AI system was always faster than human writers at generating stories, the company found, but editing its work took much longer than editing a real staffer’s copy. The tool also had a tendency to write sentences that sounded plausible but were incorrect, and it was known to plagiarize language from the sources it was trained on.
I love hearing about AI biting companies in the ass. The more spectacular failures we have, the sooner people will shut up about it.
It’s Yahoo! all over again, but even less relevant.
I dunno that’s kind of an insult to Yahoo! At least it’s fun to say.
Only because Yahoo! isn’t very relevant now, but it was when it happened to them, and due to the similarities, it kinda makes the relevant at the moment.
