Vox Media

Vox Media, Inc. is an American mass media company based in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The company was established in November 2011 by Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass SB Nation (a sports blog network founded in 2003 by Tyler Bleszinski, Markos Moulitsas, and Jerome Armstrong) and The Verge (a technology news website launched alongside Vox Media). Bankoff had been the CEO for SB Nation since 2009. Vox Media owns editorial brands, primarily The Verge, Vox, SB Nation, Eater, Polygon, and New York. New York further incorporates the websites Intelligencer, The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Curbed, and Grub Street. Recode was integrated into Vox, while Racked was shut down. Vox Media's brands are built on Concert, a marketplace for advertising, and Chorus, its proprietary content management system. The company's lines of business include the publishing platform Chorus, Concert, Vox Creative, Vox Entertainment, Vox Media Studios, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. the company operates additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, and London. In June 2010, the network featured over 300 sites with over 400 paid writers. As of August 2023, Comscore ranks Vox Media 43rd-most popular media company among users from the United States. History Background in sports media Tyler Bleszinski, a freelance writer, established Athletics Nation in 2003 as a sports blog that sought to cover the baseball team Oakland Athletics from a fan's perspective. The blog quickly became popular, becoming the second-most popular site on the Blogads network, after Daily Kos. Bleszinski, together with Daily Kos creator Markos Moulitsas and political strategist Jerome Armstrong, then established the sports blog network SB Nation around Athletics Nation in 2005. The popularity of the site led to other sports blogs being incorporated. SB Nation hired former AOL executive Jim Bankoff as an advisor in 2008 to assist in its growth. He was promoted to chief executive officer (CEO) in January 2009. He showed interest in SB Nations goal of building a network of niche-oriented sports websites. By 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% increase in unique visitors over November 2009 made SB Nation the fastest-growing sports website the company tracked at the time.