You’ve Never Heard of the Biggest Digital Media Company in America

15 Aug 2021

You’ve Never Heard of the Biggest Digital Media Company in America

Ric Elias (MBA 1994) and Red Ventures have turned very specific advice into very big business.

Re: Ricardo Elias (MBA 1994)

Topics: Advertising-Online Advertising Management-Growth and Development Strategy Communication-Media

The New York Times recently profiled Red Ventures, led by CEO and cofounder Ric Elias (MBA 1994), calling the company “perhaps the biggest digital publisher in America, a 4,500-employee juggernaut that says it has roughly $2 billion in annual revenues, a conservative valuation earlier this year of more than $11 billion, and more readers, as measured by Comscore, than any media brand you’ve ever heard of—an average of 751 million visits a month.”

The article details how Elias built the company with his cofounder in the 2000s around early innovations in digital marketing. Since then, the company has become a media powerhouse, with Lonely Planet, CNET, Healthline, and The Points Guy among the brands they manage. These are all sites, the article notes, that fall into the category of “intent-based media”, which is “a term for specialist sites that attract people who are already looking to spend money in a particular area (travel, tech, health) and guide them to their purchases, while taking a cut.”

The Times piece argues that the Red Ventures’ success represents “a challenge to the oligopolistic dominance of Amazon over the internet.” “We’re going to have a chance to be an alternative to the big walled gardens,” Elias told the paper. “This is a plane that just got some altitude.”