News. Media startup Uzabase is acquiring Quartz, the six-year-old New York-based digital business news platform, from David Bradley’s Atlantic Media. The deal is valued at $75-110m, depending on Quartz’s financial performance over the next 2-3 years, and is expected to complete this month. Tokyo-based Uzabase, which was founded by two investment bankers 10 years ago, publishes NewsPicks (subscription-based business news) and SPEEDA (financial information and corporate intelligence).Under the deal, Quartz will now manage the English-language version of NewsPicks which entered the US market last year as a joint venture with Dow Jones. NewsPicks has 3.3m registered users in Japan, with 64,000 paying $15 per month. Quartz relies mainly on branded content for revenue. Now, though, it plans to replicate the NewsPicks’ subscription strategy. The ultra-smart Quartz describes itself as “a native news outlet for business people in the new global economy”, 70% of whom are said to access it via mobile devices and some 40% from outside the US. It claims a global audience of more than 100m people, including 22m monthly web site visitors, 85m video views on facebook and Twitter, and some 700k subscribers to its newsletters including the highly-rated Daily Brief. Quartz is believed to have annual revenues of some $40m and profits of $3m. It employs 215 people including 100 journalists across the world, including recruits from the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Alongside, Business Insider (now said to be newly-profitable under Axel Springer’s ownership), Quartz has long looked like nothing less than the future of digital news, with its emphasis on high-quality journalism and exclusive content. Owner Bradley had a background in consulting before becoming a publisher in 1997. He acquired his flagship The Atlantic magazine two years later. He is an expansive media boss who has invested in journalism – both in print and digital. His team were rocked by the declaration that he will be divesting all his media activities before he is 70 – in 2023. Last year, he sold a majority share in The Atlantic to philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective (which has also discussed investing in BuzzFeed News). He still owns National Journal, DefenceOne, and Government Executive.
Uncategorised
Japan’s Uzabase buys Quartz for up to $110m
