Executive Briefing
How Food52 nailed the content, commerce, and community trifecta
Every media business is thinking about its commerce strategy. Here’s one that worked.
By Dan Frommer on Friday, October 4, 2019 at 7:00 am
Media consolidation season is underway! In addition to last week’s Vox Media-New York Magazine merger, Vice and Refinery29 and Outbrain and Taboola announced their combinations this week.
The deal I’m more interested in: Food52, the New York-based digital media and e-commerce business, has sold a majority stake to TCG, an investment firm founded by former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin, for $83 million. The sale values the company at “more than $100 million,” according to the WSJ.
Food52, founded a decade ago by food writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs (pictured above), has never tried too hard to be trendy. With a total reach of 16 million monthly unique web visitors, social media followers, and newsletter subscribers, it sits in the tricky middle ground between niche and mass media.
But through a combination of tasteful service journalism — including tens of thousands of recipes — and community interaction, it has become one of the few media startups to successfully master the elusive content, community, and commerce model, where people come to read, share, and crucially, to shop.
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